The Essentials With Jennifer Morrison: Book Clubs, Nantucket and 10 Minutes of Yoga
Reading isn’t just a source of escapism for Jennifer Morrison. It also informs much of her work, whether acting onscreen in shows like House and Once Upon a Time, or spearheading a project behind the camera as a director and the founder of production company Apartment 3C. “I rely on reading quite a bit for my process,” Morrison tells Observer. “Sometimes it crosses over in a major way, like finding things that I’ve optioned for my company, but when I’m playing a character, I often read memoirs that touch on the kind of life the character might live to sort of build memories and pull ideas.”
Morrison hosts a book club-inspired podcast, The Bookshelf, and her latest credit, directing four episodes of the just-released Peacock series, The Five-Star Weekend, also started with a book.
“I had read the book, and I was totally gripped by the concept of putting together women from different times in your life,” Morrison says of the Elin Hilderbrand novel on which the series is based. Set on the scenic island of Nantucket, The Five-Star Weekend follows food blogger Hollis Shaw (played by Jennifer Garner), as she navigates the sudden loss of her husband by hosting a girls’ weekend with four of her closest friends from different stages in her life: Chloë Sevigny as childhood friend Tatum, Regina Hall as college roommate Dru-Ann, D’Arcy Carden as mom-friend Brooke, and Gemma Chan as new confidant Gigi. “When I heard rumors that there was going to be a show made, I asked my agent to keep an eye on it, and she definitely chased it once it was happening because so many people wanted to be a part of it,” says Morrison.
Scheduling proved to be the most difficult aspect for Morrison, who met for her first table read in Los Angeles less than 24 hours after flying in from Vancouver, where she had just wrapped up directing a season four episode of Yellowjackets. Filming on Nantucket posed another obstacle for the crew, but one that was vital to the story. “It felt like Nantucket was such a character in the book,” says Morrison. “Merri Howard, the line producer, pulled off just incredible stuff to be able to get this production there because not a lot of people have filmed on Nantucket,” she shares, noting that while the interiors were filmed in Los Angeles, the production spent an entire month on Nantucket, where all of the exterior moments were shot.
And yet, for Morrison, the heart of the story came down to the women, and the complexities surrounding their friendships and their individual lives. “Jennifer Garner’s story is the center, but each character has really significant life stuff that’s going on, and that’s true to anyone,” she says. “We have all of these different identities and sort of hats that we get to put on in any given day—to be a mom but to also be a career person; if you are in a relationship, to be a partner—and so it was really interesting to see the alchemy of putting those five friends in this story together and seeing how that brought out different parts of the characters in the same way that it would bring out different parts of us.”
Already in the midst of developing two more novels for the screen, The Underneath by Melanie Finn and I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart (both authors whom she spoke with for The Bookshelf), Morrison shared her essentials with Observer, from the coffee mug she picked up in Nantucket to the four skincare products she never strays from.
