“The Five Star Weekend” cast on how women are ‘siloed’ away from each other in Hollywood — but not on their show

Jennifer Garner says she and Chloë Sevigny “have circled each other forever.”

It makes sense. Both actresses came up in the 1990s and have many high-profile projects on their respective list of credits. But, yet, they weren’t afforded the chance to work with each other until The Five Star Weekend, Peacock’s upcoming adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s best-selling novel The Five-Star Weekend.

In fact, none of the actresses at the center of the new series — also starring Gemma Chan, Regina Hall, and D’Arcy Carden — had ever even met, much less worked together before filming last summer in Los Angeles and Nantucket, supported by a female showrunner and writer, female directors, and an all-female team of producers.

“Women are typically siloed off: You play you, and then maybe you have a best friend or a boss or an assistant, but it’s rarely about a sisterhood,” Garner, an executive producer on the series herself, tells Entertainment Weekly.

That said, costarring with such powerhouses, “I was nervous to meet all of them, because I’m a fan of all their work,” says the actress, who adds that each woman ended up challenging her preconceptions of them in one way or another.

“Chloë is so cool-girl New York City and I’m so suburban mom, but actually, she’s pretty suburban [too],” says Garner. “I was surprised by how maternal she is. D’Arcy is so, so emotional, such a connector. She’s the person who is always making sure that we have taken a picture. Gemma, I was surprised that she’s a lawyer.” (Chan holds a law degree from the University of Oxford.) “I was also surprised when we had our dance scene. Gemma could really get down.” As for Hall, “Regina has a real business mindset, and she’s a real entrepreneur. And she’s so smart. Regina’s the whole package. All of us wanted time with Regina.”

Over the four-month shoot — three months in L.A., then a few weeks on Nantucket — Sevigny says Garner did a lot to make sure the cast felt comfortable getting vulnerable.

“She really set the tone and was very open,” Sevigny notes. “We just started talking about very deep things from the get-go. And being a set of mostly women… everybody was very honest about things going on in their lives, and their past, and their struggles. It created a bond very quickly.”

That bond helped the cast navigate the vacillations in tone that the new series required. Their stories, after all, grapple with losing your husband, your job, your health, your connection to your kids, your sense of self — things that aren’t easily solved by shots of tequila and a ’90s dance party.

Sevigny, 51, loves that Hollywood is embracing a story like Five Star Weekend.

“There isn’t much of a stigma, I think, around aging. Women in midlife are on the catwalks and campaigns,” she says. “It feels very exciting now that that’s happening.” The actress notes the progress in the kinds of roles she’s seeing now: “In general, there are more interesting parts for women — richer female characters, more complicated female characters. There’s an appetite for it, and an allowance for it.”

Midlife “is such an interesting age, because there’s so much happening,” adds Carden, 46. “In the same friend group, you could have somebody whose kid is going to college and somebody who’s pregnant, and somebody who is in their second marriage and somebody who’s divorced. The stories are endless.”

“There is an audience who wants to see this, who likes this content. As an actress, it’s obviously wonderful,” says Hall, 55. “I feel really grateful to work, period. And to still be not limited by age.”

Five Star Weekend series creator and showrunner Bekah Brunstetter, 43, attributes the increased interest in shows centered on women in their 40s and 50s to more awareness of this era of life in general.

“To get really granular about it, perimenopause wasn’t a word until like five years ago,” she says with a laugh. “We’re thinking about [midlife] women instead of discarding them.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly