‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ Season 2 Ending Explained By Judy Greer

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the finale episode of The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2.

Turns out Judy Greer’s Quinn Favreau, née Campano, wasn’t as hands off in her family’s operations as she first led Hannah (Jennifer Garner), Bailey (Angourie Rice), Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Walau) and viewers of The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2 to believe.

As of the last moments of the penultimate episode of Season 2, titled “Isia Moriendo Renascor,” the Campano family is in disarray because a hitwoman, who bumps into Quinn in her hasty escape from assassinating Frank Campano (John Noble), has lost its longtime leader. While arguable that Frank’s son and Quinn’s brother Teddy Campano (Luke Kirby) was taking the reins as the new head of the mysterious organization and crime syndicate that Frank did business with, it is clear, and not just to Quinn, that he does not have things under control.

“It’s like, kill or be killed, for her at that point, and Owen/Ethan, which I call him interviews, he f***ed it up the first time, and he is f***ing it up again, that f***ing guy,” Greer tells Deadline. “It’s really refreshing for me — I play a lot of sad moms — to play someone who is faced with a tragedy, a trauma, and doesn’t crumble. She uses it to build her resolve. That is something that Judy, me, would never do. I would be a mess, but it’s really cool to embody someone who has the ability to click it in. My nephew would say to ‘just lock in.’”

Quinn calmly and collectedly takes the reins in the aftermath of such a shock, not only for her and her brother but also for Nicholas Bell (David Morse), who worked for Frank and considered him a dear friend. She pivots on a bank purchase she is making in Paris, France, which brings her father and brother there in the first place — with Hannah, Owen, Bailey and Nicholas close behind — to celebrate Frank’s birthday. Now the acquisition that she already had planned can aid Teddy and other Campano clients in laundering their money. This isn’t the only instance in which she closes the distance she has seemingly put between herself and her family’s work.

Since the beginning of Season 2, Bailey, daughter of Quinn’s dead best friend Kate, has pursued answers as to who was really behind her mother’s death. Bailey’s father, Owen, was blamed for the longest time, but Bailey can’t shake a memory she keeps reliving — and it turns out to be two memories conflated — of Quinn picking her up out of a pool while her parents argued. Bailey realizes that the pool memory was separate from when Quinn picked her up at the site of the car accident that killed her mother and put her on a swing set, away from the sirens and chaos.

Quinn confesses this to Bailey and Hannah after Hannah gives her the final push to tell Bailey the truth she has been seeking since Hannah’s original Season 1 deal protecting Hannah and Bailey fell apart. Quinn is responsible for Kate’s death because she sent the driver only to scare Kate away from meeting with Ivan Escarra, Head of the Organized Crime Task Force under the FBI. Unfortunately, when Bailey — then known as Kristen — ran into the street, the car swerved and hit Kate, killing her.

“[Quinn]’s a master compartmentalizer. She allows herself to feel the things that she hasn’t felt in 20 years, in that scene, and I think that it feels really good for Quinn,” Greer says of her character’s second big twist. “It’s really cathartic for Quinn, but I also think ultimately it changes Quinn, and it turns her into the person we see at the very end of the season.”

In the below interview, Greer takes Deadline through Quinn’s evolution from pitch to script, praises the stuntwoman actress casting choice made in episode seven and shares her thoughts on a potential third season of The Last Thing She Told Me. She also teases upcoming projects The Five-Star Weekend, coming to Peacock this summer, which she also stars Jennifer Garner, and Season 2 of Apple TV’s Stick which is now in the can.

DEADLINE: Thinking about the finale and everything that we find out about Quinn, I’m curious if you feel like that can be traced back to a very specific look you give Angourie when you first meet Bailey in one of the episodes. Did you know that all of this was going to happen playing that moment? How do you look back at it?

JUDY GREER: I knew everything. I had not read everything. So they pitched me the arc of my character in the show. Many, many, many more details were revealed, and things evolved slightly, but for the most part, I knew, and so that’s where the look is from.

DEADLINE: How did they pitch Quinn to you and the arc when you were considering joining?

GREER: They pitched her pretty much [as] what you saw. I’m trying to remember if I knew she was going to take over for the family. That’s the one thing I might not have known. They told me that I was responsible for Bailey’s mom’s death. I didn’t totally know how it worked out, like how the actual death happened, like, if I had her killed, if it was an accident.

We knew how Bailey’s mom died from season one, but I don’t think I knew going into it that it wasn’t supposed to kill her, it was supposed to scare her, so that that was a little bit new for me, but no I knew that it was my fault overall, and that I was going to have to get a little bit pulled back into my family in a way that I didn’t want to. And I knew that it was going to be really hard for me — while Bailey was like really interrogating throughout the season to try to figure out what happened — to lie to her. I knew there was going to be a moment where I came clean to Bailey, but the scripts weren’t written, so I didn’t really know it was going to be this big scene with Hannah and Bailey. I don’t think I knew that. These are my memories.

DEADLINE: What would you say you felt was key to you playing this transition from someone who seemed very kind and wanting to help Bailey and Hannah to someone who had to step into this ruthless role?

GREER: Not that Hannah and Bailey are her enemies, but “Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.” When Bailey surfaces, Quinn knows she has a problem. She knows, this is the daughter of her best friend, who she knew would also never let something like this go. So she knows what she’s dealing with in the offspring of her best friend. I think in aiding them, she’s also keeping an eye on them.

DEADLINE: The moment John Noble’s character Frank Campano dies, we really see a lot of Quinn’s layers and walls come down. What was it like playing that scene and adding your own energy to Quinn when she’s dealing with these two men who, are ruthless in their own ways, but she has to really muscle up?

GREER: That whole big, giant moment was incredible. Shooting something that big and fancy — I do a lot of independent movies where we’re shuffling extras a lot. To have something that was like, “Oh my God, there’s motorcycles and assassinations, and there’s people everywhere, and we’re in like, this beautiful hotel lobby in downtown LA — wink, wink, Paris. I have to sometimes step away from the film geek in me who’s like, “Oh my god, this is so fancy.”

That part I get really sucked into. And then I’m like, “Okay, okay, back to the work, the work.” Being a part of that moment, it obviously informs so much of the character, but it solidifies, a lot in Quinn, that there is no going back. This is never going to end until she and Teddy are dead. She sees in that moment, “we’re all gone,” we’re all going to get killed eventually if someone doesn’t take the reins. And, certainly, it can’t be Teddy, because he has f***ed this up so much, so there’s no other choice.

It’s really cool to embody someone who has the ability to click it in. My nephew would say to “just lock in.” I’m like, “What are you gonna do this summer?” He’s like, “I’m gonna lock in this summer.” I’m like “I don’t know what that means,” but now I’m saying it to you in this interview. I’m like, “Yeah, Quinn, just locked in at that moment.”

DEADLINE: That’s what the kids are using these days.

GREER: He’s 13, so..

DEADLINE: Quinn mentions, I love analyzing these things…

GREER: Me too.

DEADLINE: But when she says, “It’s called compartmentalizing, try it” to her brother…

GREER: Yes, she’s a master at that. I am not, also. It’s fun playing these characters that, I have to find things about Quinn in Judy, myself. I have to find things about her and I that are similar, and then I’m really able to relish in the differences, too. Like, “Goddamn, I wouldn’t do that, but Quinn would.”

DEADLINE: In the scene where you do come clean about what happened to Kate and how it was an accident, but you were ultimately responsible, do you think that’s Quinn’s first time really reliving that memory in a second? That she’s kind of buried it? How did you approach that scene?

GREER: I think, like you said, and like Quinn says, she’s a master compartmentalizer. She allows herself to feel the things that she hasn’t felt in 20 years, in that scene, and I think that it feels really good for Quinn. It’s really cathartic for Quinn, but I also think ultimately it changes Quinn, and it turns her into the person we see at the very end of the season.

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I’d like to go back one second and shout out to the assassin in the scene where my father is killed because I love that casting choice, and I loved that stunt actress. I just thought it was such a cool choice to have it be this punk rock woman on a motorcycle.

When we were in hair and makeup that morning, and she came in to get her hair and makeup done, and I was like, “Oh, hey, I’m Judy. What are you playing?” And she’s French, even though we shot in LA, which was really funny, but when she told me what she was playing, I just was like, “Oh, my God, I’m on the smartest show on television.” Because how easy would it have been to cast some big, scary guy, you know? This super cool, point of no return, Bridget Fonda character, you know what I mean?

DEADLINE: I’m so glad you brought that up, because I know, Hello Sunshine, a big theme for them is women’s stories. And Quinn, a woman, steps up at the end and has to be this boss lady. Could you see the show getting a season three? Would you want to come back for a season three?

GREER: Yes, one hundred [percent] emphatically, yes, yeah. I would love to see what’s next, for Quinn, especially, and I would love to play it, because it was — I don’t want to say once in a lifetime. It’s been very few offers I’ve gotten that have really been flattering to me, and also, knowing that my boss, Jennifer Garner, on the show, one of my bosses, was very instrumental in telling these people, “She can do this, you guys should think about it. She’d be great.”

Another cool thing I think about casting someone like me is that it’s a little like, you don’t totally see it coming, right?

DEADLINE: Nope.

GREER: Okay, that’s what my goal was. That was what I was hoping [would happen], so hats off to Hello Sunshine and Apple and my boss, Jennifer Garner, who had faith and belief that this was a cool version of this character. And so yes, to see what would be next would be a dream come true.

DEADLINE: I know you’re working on The Five-Star Weekend with Jennifer too. Could you tease what that project has been like?

GREER: Jennifer and I like to work together on jobs that take us to cool places. So this one was Nantucket. We had so much fun making this show. I’m not as prominent in this season of that show, which was great. The five stars are just incredible. Chloë Sevigny, Regina [Hall], Gemma [Chan], D’Arcy [Carden], Jennifer.

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I felt a little bit like a fly on the wall there. I got to watch these incredible women [of] all really different tones and types. Putting them all together, it’s a cool story. It was really fun to do, and I loved just seeing how all these women played off of each other. And then I got to come in. I come in and f**k sh*t up every once in a while. I’m like a foil. I hope I’m allowed to say that.

DEADLINE: I also wanted to ask if you could tease anything about Stick season two?

GREER: Oh my god, literally, we finished it Thursday [March 26]. We wrapped on Thursday. I don’t know what they want me to say or not say, but it was super fun. There are new characters added. Still obsessed with Owen Wilson. That guy, he has my heart and yeah, I’m really excited about that one too.

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