SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers for “The Five-Star Weekend,” now streaming on Peacock.
For “The Five-Star Weekend” showrunner Bekah Brunstetter, women’s stories only get richer as they age.
“There’s so much change that happens in your 40s and 50s — and I don’t just mean menopause and perimenopause, which has become what we’re talking about recently,” Brunstetter tells Variety. “Big life changes continue to happen. Some women are still trying to have children. Some women are getting out of their first marriage. Some women are getting their children out of the nest. Some women are just falling in love for the first time. Some women are just where they want to be in their careers for the first time.”
The breadth of those experiences is captured in Peacock’s new series adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel of the same name. The story follows food influencer Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner), who, six months after losing her husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton), in a tragic car accident, organizes a girls’ weekend at her Nantucket home, inviting a friend from each stage of her life.
Naturally, each woman brings her own baggage — both literally and figuratively — to the picturesque Massachusetts island. Tatum McKenzie (Chloë Sevigny), Hollis’ childhood best friend who owns a local dry cleaning business, is anxiously awaiting the results of her breast biopsy. Hollis’ college roommate turned sports agent, Dru-Ann Jones (Regina Hall), arrives under a cloud of controversy after a viral video caught her seemingly dismissing a client’s mental health struggles. Rounding out the original group is Brooke Kirtley (D’Arcy Carden), a Wellesley “mom friend” navigating a looming separation from her husband (Rob Huebel), a smarmy corporate executive facing a workplace misconduct lawsuit.
And then there is the weekend’s wildcard: Gigi Ling (Gemma Chan), a commercial pilot who struck up an online friendship with Hollis after Matthew’s death. Unbeknownst to Hollis and the rest of the guests, Gigi’s presence isn’t altruistic; she is using the weekend to process her own grief over an affair she had with Matthew. The eventual exposure of this secret forces Hollis finally to confront the painful truth that her marriage wasn’t nearly as perfect as she had led herself to believe.
Witnessing all of this as the weekend unfolds is Hollis’ daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane), who returns to Nantucket to spend time with her mom. She has a secret of her own: Though she was planning to follow in her cardiovascular surgeon father’s footsteps, Caroline is now flunking out of college. “The Five-Star Weekend” also features a couple of notable reunions for Garner; her “The Last Thing He Told Me” co-star Hamilton appears in flashbacks as her late husband, and Timothy Olyphant — her co-lead in 2006’s “Catch & Release” — plays Hollis’ first love, Jack.
In the wide-ranging chat below, Brunstetter opens up about the process of adapting Hildebrand’s novel with the help of Garner, the major creative changes that she made to tell a story deeply rooted in female friendship — and her plans to expand the narrative beyond the source material into future seasons.
She has children around the age of Caroline, so she was really interested in that relationship being a primary part of the show, and digging into how complicated that time of life is when you’re parenting your adult child. My kids are little; I haven’t experienced that yet. So she was a real, invaluable resource there when it came to, “Here’s what these conversations are actually like.”
She’s been really open about this — she’s lived the infidelity story, and it played out in a very public way. I’m not going to say she’s past it, but she’s certainly done a lot of work and she’s very evolved about it, which I love about her. But she was a resource digging into how that feels beyond what we see in the book. And then lastly, she knows what it’s like to have been Jen from West Virginia and then become this public person. She knows what that does to sense of self and to your identity when you fracture off into the famous Jen Garner and then the private Jen Garner. So all of that stuff became even more interesting when we started to talk about that.
To me, Brooke was the perfect person to discover it first. She’s my favorite character. I find her insecurity and her oversharing to be so relatable. She so badly desperately wants to be loved and liked, and as it is in the book, when she meets Gigi, she’s just enamored. They have their own little story going off shopping that’s in the show. I thought it would be so funny and agonizing and dramatic if she’s the one who finds out first, because if it were Tatum or Dru-Ann, they would just tell Hollis immediately.
But Brooke is really agonizing over it, because she’s like, “What’s the right thing to do? What do I do with this information? I kind of like Gigi. Gigi’s really cool. I like how she makes me feel. She makes me feel picked. And is this my business? Hollis and I are in a weird place, so should I blow that up?” I thought since she’s a person who second guesses and overthinks, it would be a hilarious situation to put her in. She also has a crazy amount of growth over the weekend, and part of that growth is deciding what to do with the news.
At the beginning of the weekend, to Tatum and Dru, the fun is that she’s like the “annoying friend,” but she’s the one who ends up being the one to loop in the group and decide what to do as a team. The idea was to have them at first not really know each other and be at odds with each other and then have them rally around Hollis against this common enemy of Gigi, where it doesn’t really matter whether or not they’re getting along or what their past is. They love this woman dearly, and they’re going to try and figure out what to do and how to protect her.
Of course, Jen is the reason for the weekend, and the star, but I really wanted these other women to have very formidable stories and give them all as much depth as possible in our very limited literal time, which is a 72-hour weekend. So bringing them all in just keeps them from being siloed and gives them more to work with.
I’m such a sap, and I believe in the goodness of everyone, sometimes to a fault. But I love that a big theme in the book is forgiveness. I also love that by the end of the book, it’s not that these two women are going to be best friends, but they do reach a place of understanding and Hollis sends her on her way with grace, which I thought was really beautiful and moving. So I wanted to keep that part of the story. I just don’t write things where they’re bad guys. I think it’s more interesting when people are flawed, but the audience is taken on this journey of understanding why they did what they did, so I wanted to protect that.
It’s too easy to just villainize Gigi — and she’s not villainized in the book. I wanted to dig into why she had this affair. So we talked a lot in the writers’ room about why people have affairs and how, of course, so much bad behavior is usually about something going on within you. Certainly, no one wakes up and says, “You know what I’d like to do today? Ruin a marriage, and blow up my life.” Love is extremely powerful, and feeling desired and wanted and seen — those are extremely powerful feelings, and they make us do crazy things.
Of course, we filmed it so many ways on set, and then this is where we ended up through the [editing] process. We had versions with more warmth, but why we ended up where we did is because we want to feel strength and growth from Hollis. We don’t want her to feel like she has such a capacity for forgiveness that she hasn’t gained strength over the weekend from her friends. It’s a fine line. We just wanted to make sure that she doesn’t feel like she doesn’t have a backbone.
In terms of her diagnosis, from the beginning, when we were developing the show, the producers and I were like, “How can we make something lovely and sweet and aspirational that also has some meat on the bones? Can we have it both ways?” Oftentimes, when you set out to do that, it skews too far in one direction. We felt like giving her a positive diagnosis gave it some grit and some teeth, because that is oftentimes the true outcome. When she finds out she doesn’t have cancer at the end of the book, it’s a part of this breezy [ending], like everybody’s fine and great now, which is certainly how Elin intentionally leaves her books. But we wanted to see what would happen if we gave her a different ending. It certainly doesn’t mean she’s going to die, but it does mean that she’s got some stuff to deal with that is going to be hard to go through, given that it’s how she lost her mom.
I’m a straight lady. I ended up having a mostly queer writers’ room, which is great, so I had a lot of help there. We had a lot of really interesting conversations, because queer people aren’t a monolith. It’s not like, “Oh, every time a woman comes out late in life, it’s going to be the same.” But we talked a lot about how women go around envying each other and admiring each other.
So when women come out later in life, there’s this feeling of, “Every time I loved or was obsessed with that woman, is it because I was attracted to her?” I think it’s kind of different for men. So we talked a lot about that, how she spent her whole life feeling less than and trying to be other people, trying on other personalities. We see that externalized through her clothes. And it’s not as simple as, “Do I want to kiss girls?” It’s like, “Wait, a core piece of my identity, this latching onto other women and wanting to be them — is that a part of this searching and longing that I’ve never had a name for?”
With Charlie, I’ve been in relationships like this earlier in my life that I thankfully got out of, but there’s this co-dependency that keeps you from seeing and confronting the truth, kind of like with Hollis and Matthew. It’s so scary and so life-rocking that you choose not to see. You wake up every day, and you make the choice. So I think, for her, we just wanted to try — and I hope to God we succeeded — and slow it down a little bit so it’s not by the end of the weekend like, “I’m gay!” It’s just like, “Oh my gosh, I’m giving myself permission to step out of this box that I’ve created for myself. What does that mean?” I hope we get to do more seasons of it, and the way that we set it up is not like, “In Season 2, Brooke’s a lesbian!” She’s just thinking in a new way.
She is just such a force. That started from a young age when she was a star soccer player at UNC, which is similar-ish to the book [where she’s a golfer]. But she’s had this drive that young athletes have, and they don’t give themselves a break. I think this happens a lot with young Black women as well in sports. She took that energy and pivoted over to her career as an agent, and now she’s in her 50s. For the first time, you’ve got the literal and the metaphorical. Her boss is like, “Take a break. You’re causing me problems.” And then, her old college injury gets triggered. I believe in all that woo-woo stuff, that there’s pain in the body from old injuries. So she really is cracking open this pain that she never really dealt with in college, and she’s now with her college friend, so she’s just being laid bare.
The thing that these weekends away with friends do for us is, they force us to ask these big questions about our lives. For her, it’s like, “Well, what if I stopped? What if I rested? What if I took a beat? Maybe I’ve been too hard on Posey. I’m probably too hard on some of my other clients. Maybe [my boss] doesn’t have my best interests at heart.” She says casually in the finale, “I think I’m going to start my own thing,” but we didn’t want it to be like, “I am starting my own thing.” Because if we get to do more seasons, that’s not going to be the story. So I wanted it to be more like she’s open.
She’s healed an important relationship with Posey. She realized that she’s been repeating her own behavior. She’s been treating her essentially like her surrogate daughter, like she was treated — which has made her who she is today, which is good and bad. But she’s learned that she needs to let up and that there is some truth to this younger generation going on and on about mental health. Of course, it’s a crutch, but there’s a lot of truth there, and it’s really good that we’re talking about it at all. So I think she’s more receptive to change than she was at the beginning of the weekend.
We want young women to watch the show too; we want younger people to see themselves in the show. I just find Caroline and Hollis’ relationship so heartbreaking, because that’s what young women do — we’re horrible to our mothers, and yet we so badly need our mothers and we need their comfort. For Hollis, having lost her mother when she was so young, it’s all just so rich.
The other big change is we made her pre-med, on a path to be a doctor like her dad. But she’s lost her dad, and she’s realizing, in addition to her grief, maybe that’s not the best path for her. Since I wanted to keep her on the island, I wanted her to have a story connected to her grief, so that we could tell parallel stories with Caroline and Hollis and have them come together by the end and learn how to communicate about their grief.
But I also wanted her to be a mess, and to make mistakes. In the book, Tatum’s son, Dylan, is who she gets entwined with. We made Aubrey Tatum’s daughter and gave Caroline a friendship story with Aubrey, because the show is about friendship. Caroline and Aubrey played together when they were little girls but don’t really remember each other, which is a very specific feeling. I wanted to be able to talk about friendship in every story in some way. It’s not like “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” I didn’t want her to fall in love with the guy. I wanted her to be going through everything she’s going through while also lusting after this guy, but then choosing the friendship over the guy.
Jen wanted both of her love interests to be ideally guys that she knows, so that she can have a shorthand and a comfort with them. So I think, actually, he was on a short list of names that she presented to us early on as well, but everyone was really excited about him from the beginning. I got such a great little relationship with him going where he would text me with little line tweaks, which I’m so open to, and little questions. He has zero problem just being Jen Garner’s love interest — no ego, just happy to be there. He also was thoughtful about all of his scenes and had little ideas, so I really appreciated that.
It would be all my invention, but I’ve got a lot of ideas. Even when we were back in the writers’ room, we were imagining what would happen if these women met up again. We’re following these stories that Elin set up, but it wouldn’t be more of her [books]. But she and I have gotten so close, and what we would do, if we got to do more, is she would probably come chat with the writers room and see what we all come up with.
From the beginning, we thought, “In a perfect world, well, there’s five Stars. Who is the new fifth Star?” That’s a fun setup, and then you could focus a little bit on a different Star every season. So you get five trips, five Stars, or four trips and a new fifth Star every season. There’s a lot of fun to be had, but what I’m so curious to see is, “What are people going to think? What do people latch onto? Which characters do they latch onto?” That will really dictate what we do, if we get to do more, because I’m like, “Give the people what they want. How can we give people more of a thing that’s delighting them?” We’ve got a bunch of different ideas percolating, so we’ll see.
We do have a ski idea. I think we would do another warm [location] and then a cold, but it would go to different places, like a “White Lotus” vibe. Nantucket was amazing but very hard to shoot on, and we feel like we got it all. We did Nantucket. They don’t need us there again.