Jennifer Garner Gets Ready to "Lean Into the Cringe" on Camping

"We had conversations, but I was wary of playing Lena because I already had her words. And so I ended up talking a lot to women in support groups," Garner said. "And I have friends who have personally gone through things like this, and so I kind of pulled from all different people."

Garner added that Kathryn's health problems made her empathize with a character who can, at times, be thorny and difficult.

"I have a lot of love for Kathryn. I feel like the way that Jenni and Lena wrote her, over time, you understand her more and more, and you have glimpses of who she was before her body started to kind of fail her," Garner explains. "And there are a few things that she says that are so specific and so painful, and it's a horrible thing to say. She's not a careful person. [Like,] 'I wish I had cancer so that people could see me and feel bad for me. But because I look normal, nobody gets that I'm in pain all the time.' And I think you do build up defences around that."

Garner knocked on the wooden end table to her right. "Luckily, I'm not somebody who lives with chronic pain, so I don't know. But I can understand it, and I can understand how it would change who you are over time."

Kathryn's inability to be careful with other people is central to the series, which tackles the joys — and strains — of long-term friendships.

"The show, to me, is a lot about female relationships," Garner said. "And it's a lot about just friendship over time and what friendships can go through and still be richer for it. Or what the breaking point of a friendship might actually be."

Garner said her own decades-long bonds with friends made the series ring especially true.

"I haven't had many friendships break, thank goodness, but I have had friendships endure. I can look at several girlfriends and say, 'Yes. This has been one of the dearest people in my life for 20-plus years,'" she said. "And that takes something. I can think of a time where I was selfish and injured a friendship. And it took years and years, but now, that's just a blip in the past."

But while the show tackles some heartfelt and heavy topics — infidelity, racism, midlife crises — it is, at its heart, a comedy. The campground setting raises all the interpersonal stakes as often as it provides comedic relief. And the fact that it was shot outdoors also made for a memorable experience for the cast and crew. According to Konner, there were "a million snakes" on set, necessitating a full-time rattlesnake handler.

"At one point we were shooting and in the middle of kind of an intense scene, and it was dusk or starting to be dark. And all of a sudden, in the middle of a take, Jenni, all the producers, and the script supervisors, they're all in the shot with us," Garner laughs. "We're focussed, and we're kind of like, 'What are you doing?' And they said, 'We heard a rattle!'"