‘The Greatest Hits’ Stars Lucy Boynton & Justin H. Min Explain Harriet’s ‘Devastating’ Choice & ‘Hopeful’ Ending
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers about The Greatest Hits.]
Nostalgia and grief get intertwined in The Greatest Hits, now streaming on Hulu. With the help of specific songs, Harriet (Lucy Boynton) finds herself capable of traveling back to the past before her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet), is tragically killed.
The songs take Harriet back to the time she and Max first heard them together, but she also suffers seizures in the process. Despite her many attempts during each time-traveling trip, Harriet is unable to stop Max’s death from happening. When Harriet meets and falls in love with David (Justin H. Min), Harriet eventually comes to a life-altering decision. Harriet figures out a way to save Max, and it’s by never starting a relationship with him in the first place when she travels back one last time. This also means she has to sacrifice her current romance with David, but she promises to look for him in this new timeline.
“It’s devastating. I wept when we were filming this,” Boynton tells TV Insider. “I hope the audience has a similar reaction of it being a catalyst of, well, what would I do? She’s so stuck between a rock and a hard place that, because of this physical difficulty of the seizures being triggered by music, she doesn’t really have a choice. But it’s the emotional toll that it takes [which] is the most devastating and also having her emotionally and mentally catch up to that place that she kind of analytically knows it’s an inevitability. I just hope it’s kind of thought provoking in that sense of the audience wondering if they would do the same.”
However, the final moments of The Greatest Hits leave viewers with a sense of optimism. At a concert, Harriet and David cross paths again. They don’t know each other in this new timeline, but you can feel an undeniable energy between them in that moment.
“I found it to be very hopeful,” Min says of the ending. “The scene where Harriet realizes that they’ve seen each other before — Harriet and David — that scene really stuck with me. It’s this idea of love transcends all, as cliche as that sounds, love transcends time [and] space. And if two people are meant to find each other, they will find each other. And, of course, we don’t know how this story ends, but it is wonderful that this last scene, we see them crossing paths once more.”
Boynton believes Harriet recognizes David in that final scene because she’s “experienced” that type of feeling before. “You meet someone, and there’s a familiarity immediately and or just like an ease [between them],” she explains. “I think I made sense of it in that sense that it’s like, you don’t want to give the audience too much of an answer either way. You want to leave that sense of possibility, but I do think there’s some kind of magic there.”
The Umbrella Academy alum admits that last scene was filmed “about 500 times. We tried so many different ways in terms of how we saw each other and looked at each other and whether that meant recognition or not. I love how it was edited. It allows the audience to project whatever they want to project.”
The Greatest Hits marks a reunion for Boynton and Corenswet, who starred in Netflix‘s The Politician together. Once Corenswet’s name was brought into the mix, Boynton knew he’d be “perfect” for Max. “He and I have great chemistry because we know how the other person works,” Boynton quips. “Also, I’ve grieved his face before, so it was literally like picking up where I left off. I have that kind of association with him, so it was a real gift and made total sense as soon as we processed it.”
The Greatest Hits, Streaming on Hulu
