Life was a little different when HBO’s “The Leftovers” premiered in 2014. Carrie Coon wasn’t an A-lister. Joe Rogan hadn’t brought a certain type of attention to Austin. No one had heard of Covid-19.
But the show, based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name, developed a cult following (pun intended) that continues to worship at the altar of director and executive producer Damon Lindelof, also the force behind “LOST” and “Watchmen.”
Last month, Max assured fans that the show would stay in the streaming catalogue after outcries on social media that it may depart.
This weekend, ten years after they first arrived in Austin to film the second season, the cast and crew of “The Leftovers” made their way back to the city for a reunion at the ATX TV Festival.
The mystery drama follows a group of people in New York state navigating grief three years after the “Sudden Departure” — an inexplicable event that spontaneously wiped 2% of the world’s population off the face of the Earth. In the wake of this event, we meet the Garveys, a dysfunctional family helmed by patriarch Kevin (Justin Theroux) trying to cling to some sense of normalcy while his estranged wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman) copes by joining the Guilty Remnant — a nihilistic cult led by Patti Levin (Ann Dowd) whose members chain smoke and communicate only through written notes. And we’re also introduced to Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), who strikes up a relationship with Kevin after losing her entire family in the departure.
After premiering to critical acclaim, the show’s second season picks up in the fictional town of Jarden, Texas — a miracle town untouched by the departure. There, the Garveys and Nora join countless visitors who make the pilgrimage to the Texas town, thinking it can offer them answers and protection from tragedy.
Co-creators Perrotta and Lindelof, director and executive producer Mimi Leder, and cast members Coon (“White Lotus,” “Gilded Age”), Brenneman (“Private Practice”), and Dowd (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) sat down with IndieWire’s Ben Travers to talk about the show’s legacy, its exploration of loss and faith, and their memories of their second season in Austin. Here’s some of what we learned.
Lindelof found the perfect contrast for season one in Texas
In the writer’s room for season one, Perrotta had the idea of a town where no one had departed. It stuck with Lindelof and the other writers when it came time to figure out how to continue the story in season two. For Lindelof, there were a few reasons Austin made sense as a stand-in for Jarden.
“Peter Berg had done “Friday Night Lights” here, and there was a lot of incredibly talented crew and infrastructure here,” Lindelof said. “But more importantly, it just kind of felt like the opposite of cold, blue New York. We talked to Mimi about it and HBO, and said “We’re thinking of just completely and totally moving the show.” And they were like, ‘Yeah, sounds good.’”
Brenneman on how Austin warmed up the show and changed her character
Season one wasn’t initially meant to be so bleak. Set and filmed during the spring, the production was subjected to the polar vortex in upstate New York. Moving season two to Texas opened up the cast and crew to new opportunities.
“Season one did have this relentless quality to it,” says Brenneman. “So [that feeling] leading into the joy and color and literal warmth of season two, I feel like with that shift, we could bring some of the humor that was in the book that was hard to access sometimes in season one. People were funnier. That’s what I always loved about this premise was that something unexplained happens, and people have all sorts of responses. Some people go to a faith place. Some people go to a nihilistic place. Some people crack jokes.”
Nora gave Coon her big break
Coon read Perrotta’s book when her husband, Tracy Letts, was considering auditioning for the role of Kevin Garvey. (“In the book, [Kevin] was much closer to Tracy than Justin Theroux, but he quickly learned it wasn’t going to go that way,” she joked.) At the time, Coon had only booked a handful of roles and commercials, before starring in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” on Broadway when casting director Ellen Lewis came to see her.
“She’s the only person who knew who I was. I had done one guest star spot on NBC’s “Playboy Club,” but Ellen called me in and put me on tape for The Leftovers,” she says. “I just wanted to work, I was young. It was my first real job. I had no idea what was going to happen.”
Having come from a theater background, Coon says there was an adjustment to working in TV. “I come from the theater, where you respect the writer,” she said. “I remember learning several years later that I was the only actor on the show who wasn’t constantly emailing and asking questions and calling [Lindelof and Perrotta] up and asking for clarification. I would just get the script, and then I would do it. I was, of course, gratified about how the role grew and changed over time. I fell in love with her. She taught me a lot about how to walk into a room, how to not apologize for yourself, and where your voice is supposed to be.”
Ann Dowd first thought Patti Levin was “ridiculous”
As the leader of The Guilty Remnant, Dowd didn’t technically “read” for the role of Patti — she had no lines, just an audition where she wrote them out.
“My agent and manager told me, ‘It’s Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta,’ and I said ‘And?’” she recalled.”I thought, what’s going to happen if I’m not talking? Who’s going to pay any mind? But I have never loved a character more. I can’t believe the power you have in a room when you’re not speaking. Everybody is waiting to see what you’re going to do.”
Lindelof told Brenneman why she shouldn’t take the job
“I had just come off of Private Practice, which I had a wonderful time doing,” said Brenneman. “It was network [TV], and I wanted to do something less glamorous. I was so pleased to sit down with Damon, and he said, ‘Here are the reasons you shouldn’t take this job: it shoots in New York, you can’t wear any makeup, and you have no lines.’”
Instead of turning it down, Brenneman said she thought: “I’m fucking in.”
Leder directed a harrowing stoning scene in her first episode
“I was terrified,” she remembered. “I was just thinking, ‘How am I going to direct this and not kill the actor?’ It was really quite challenging, and the lovely actress, Marceline Hugot, we had styrofoam rocks to throw at her, but they still hurt her, so I said ‘Okay, every time I say bam, you throw your head back.’ And then we put up a dummy that we threw real rocks at. So it was a miracle of editing.”
It was a distressing introduction to the show, but Leder says her experience with Perrotta, Lindelof, and the cast made her want to stick around a story that was so committed to its search for the meaning of life.
“I’m still in search of it,” she said. “You can make a TV show or a movie and it can be really good, but this was this big, beautiful baby that had touched everybody’s soul. Even for us making it, we were constantly blown away by the material. When we shot the cavewoman sequence [at the beginning of season two] it was like, ‘Oh, okay, it wasn’t just the departure, this is an ancient experience of birth, grief, loss.’ All those things made me stay.”
Perrotta on moving beyond the ending of his novel in season two
While season one covered the length of Perrotta’s original story, HBO’s renewal of the show for season two gave him the option to imagine a life beyond it. He found inspiration in research he was conducting for a novel about evangelicalism.
“The tweak in the show is that this event just happens,” he said. “It resembles the rapture, but it’s random. It does not have any kind of coherent Christian meaning. Obviously, the show ended up dealing with so many different ideas, and it’s ultimately about faith, but I think for me, it was about randomness and the way people make sense of a random or meaningless universe. [A character like] Nora, her life would be completely devastated, but there might be a community over here that’s untouched. What does it mean for Nora and her family to show up there? It felt very rich, but in that way of The Leftovers, I didn’t know what to make of it.”
Coon was intimidated by Regina King in season two
Previously, Coon admitted to having been intimidated as an actor only two times: working with David Thewlis and Holly Hunter. Reflecting on The Leftovers, she realized that wasn’t true.
“I was scared of Regina. She’s so uniformly excellent. When you work with her, you realize that the work she has done to get there is in her bones, I can cry thinking about it. She’s one of the best listeners I’ve ever worked with. So when you speak into that, you can’t help but have an experience, because there’s something so grounded and soulful happening in front of you. And she’s not living in that in between [takes]. She doesn’t have to crawl so far up there that you can’t find her. She’s not like that at all.”
Unexplainable things happened to Dowd while filming
When Dowd touched down in Australia to film season three, it was just after dropping off her daughter at college. Not long after, she found herself having a panic attack.
“At the time, I was living with [Justin Theroux],” she said. “I’d never had a panic attack, and it was scary, but Justin told me what was happening, and he talked me through it. The next day, I felt like a new person, and I wanted to get him something special, so I went down the street to the church, and they had a little area where they were selling Christian medals. I walked in and the gentleman said, ‘It’s hard to be away from home, isn’t it? It’s hard to be away from your children, especially when something major happens in their life.’ He knew things about me, that I’d just come to Australia, that I live in New York City, and then I found the perfect medal, and as I was walking away, I turned around and said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he said ‘Kevin.’ I swear, I almost wept on the spot. Things like that happened when we were doing this. They were remarkable. I’ll never forget them.”
Laurie was originally going to die in season three
The final moments of episode six in season three left viewers convinced that Laurie had taken her own life, only to find out in the finale that she’s still alive. According to Lindelof, that reveal almost never happened.
“When Laurie went into the water scuba diving, we as writers were absolutely, totally convinced at the time that we wrote that episode, that she was dead,” he said. “We had been really excited about writing the finale, because we knew what we were headed for, but then everybody was super depressed, and we couldn’t generate ideas. Finally, I walked into Tom’s office and I said, ‘I think Laurie is still alive.’ And he was like, ‘Thank God, because we’ve all been talking about it.’ She wouldn’t do it. After everything she’s been through, she wouldn’t kill herself, and now she’s going to be Nora’s, tether, her lifeline in the finale. That was a case of the show just out and out, rejecting something that we were trying to force onto it.”
The show inspired wild fan reactions
Following her onscreen death at the end of season one, Patti returns in season two, this time as a ghost-like figure, haunting Kevin’s psyche. But because of Lindelof’s previous tenure on Lost, he found that wild fan theories followed him to The Leftovers.
“In the second season of the show, there’s a scene between Patti and Kevin, where they’re in the car, and he’s saying, ‘What do I need to do to make you go away?’” Lindelof said. “And Anne gives an incredible performance describing what he needs to do: find an ancient chalice and fill it with his … ejaculate, and he needs to drink it, and she’ll go away. She’s trolling him, but when we got picked up for a third season, this guy came up to me and was like “So is Kevin going to find the chalice?”
