112 Fun Facts About The Leftovers

On which network did The Leftovers air?

HBO aired The Leftovers for three seasons, from June 2014 to June 2017; the series was produced for the network by Warner Bros. Television.

What percentage of the world's population vanishes in the Sudden Departure?

Around one in fifty people disappear at once.

On what date did the Sudden Departure happen?

The Sudden Departure happened on October 14, 2011; the show's anniversaries fall on that date, and a season 2 episode is titled 'Ten Thirteen' after the day before.

Who plays police chief Kevin Garvey?

Theroux had co-written Tropic Thunder and Iron Man 2 before taking the part.

Who plays Nora Durst?

Carrie Coon plays Nora Durst, her first major television role; she came from Chicago's Steppenwolf stage and earned a 2013 Tony nomination for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Who plays Reverend Matt Jamison?

Christopher Eccleston plays the Reverend Matt Jamison; the Salford-born English actor was earlier known for Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later.

How is Matt related to Nora?

Jill and Aimee only find this out by following Nora around town.

Whom did Nora lose in the Departure?

Her whole family vanished from the breakfast table while she was in the kitchen.

Which cult wears white and chain-smokes in silence?

Its members take a vow of silence and stalk the townspeople as living reminders.

Who plays Laurie?

Amy Brenneman plays Laurie Garvey; she had earlier co-created and starred in the CBS drama Judging Amy, inspired by her own mother, a Connecticut judge.

Who leads the cult's chapter in Kevin's town?

Ann Dowd plays her, and keeps playing her after the character dies.

Whom does Kevin's son Tommy follow at the start of the series?

Wayne claims to hug people's pain away.

Who plays Meg Abbott, the woman seduced by the cult?

Meg ends up leading the cult's violent radical wing.

Who plays Jill Garvey?

Margaret Qualley plays Jill Garvey, her first major screen role; she had trained as a ballet dancer before switching to acting.

In which fictional New York town is season 1 set?

Season 1 is set in Mapleton, New York, a suburban town whose residents burn the Guilty Remnant's houses in the season 1 finale.

Season 2 moves to which fictional Texas town?

Season 2 moves to Jarden, Texas, a small town near Austin that draws pilgrims; the real Lockhart, Texas stood in for its main street during filming.

What makes the Texas town special?

It becomes a national park and a pilgrimage site.

What is the national park around the Texas town called?

Wristbands control who gets in; a camp of the excluded grows outside.

Which family become the Garveys' neighbours in Texas?

John is a firefighter, Erika a doctor, and their twins are Michael and Evie.

Who plays Erika Murphy?

King later won an Oscar for If Beale Street Could Talk.

Whom does John Murphy marry by season 3?

Together they run a fraudulent medium act.

What happens to Evie Murphy and two friends in the season 2 premiere?

Evie Murphy and two friends vanish from their car by the lake the night of an earthquake, and the lake drains; they had staged a departure to join the Guilty Remnant.

Whose ghost haunts Kevin through season 2?

His guide calls her Kevin's "adversary".

How does Patti die?

Kevin had refused to kill her; Matt helps him bury the body.

Near which New York town does Kevin wake up having kidnapped Patti?

Kevin wakes in a cabin near Cairo, New York, with Patti bound and gagged; the season 1 episode is titled 'Cairo' after the town.

What does Kevin do in his sleep that alarms him in season 1?

He wakes in his car near Cairo with no memory of the drive.

Who guides Kevin into the afterworld in season 2?

Virgil, played by Steven Williams, guides Kevin into the afterworld by giving him poison; he then shoots himself rather than administer the antidote.

What form does the afterworld take when Kevin first visits it?

The scenes were shot in a real Austin hotel.

What role does Kevin take on in the hotel afterworld?

Kevin becomes an international assassin by choosing the suit from four outfits in the hotel wardrobe; the season 2 episode is titled 'International Assassin' after the role.

Whose quote greets Kevin on the hotel wardrobe?

The card on the wardrobe quotes Epictetus: 'Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.' The Stoic philosopher was born a slave in the first century.

Where must Kevin take Patti to be rid of her, according to his father?

Kevin Sr., speaking through a flickering hotel TV from Australia, tells Kevin he must take Patti to the well to be rid of her.

What game show does Patti say she won enough money on to leave her husband?

She admits she was too scared to actually leave.

Which Verdi piece recurs through Kevin's first hotel episode?

Verdi's Hebrew Slaves' chorus, 'Va, pensiero' from Nabucco, recurs through 'International Assassin' as Kevin moves through the hotel.

Which film's plot does Kevin's hotel mission to kill Patti openly resemble?

Kevin retrieves a gun hidden in a bathroom before a meeting, just as Michael Corleone does in The Godfather.

What does Kevin have to do to return to life in the season 2 finale?

After he is shot, Kevin must sing karaoke in the hotel bar to return to life; David Burton, the mystery man, puts him on stage and he comes back once the song ends.

How is the GR faction that invaded the town wiped out?

Meg and Evie die in it in the season 3 premiere.

What does Matt bet at roulette in "Two Boats and a Helicopter"?

He wins, then misses the foreclosure deadline while unconscious in hospital.

What does Matt publish that outs local sinners?

Matt hands out a self-published tabloid of flyers exposing departed townspeople as gamblers, adulterers and abusers, to argue the Departure was not the Rapture.

What happened to Matt's wife Mary during the Departure?

She wakes briefly the night they arrive in Texas.

What does Matt discover when he takes Mary for an MRI in Austin?

The Austin scan shows Mary is pregnant; Matt insists she woke for one night, but John suspects he assaulted her while comatose and refuses to vouch for them.

What does the GR steal from houses across town at Christmas?

They use them to build the replicas.

What goes missing from the town nativity in "B.J. and the A.C."?

The mayor secretly tells Kevin to buy a new one and rough it up.

What does the GR place around town in the season 1 finale?

The town responds by burning the cult's houses.

Where does Kevin ask Nora out after first meeting her?

Their reunion in the finale also turns on a memory of a dance.

What does Nora pay escorts to do in "Guest"?

In 'Guest', Nora pays an escort to shoot her in the chest while she wears a bulletproof vest, a ritual she repeats to feel something.

What is Nora's job?

Nora is a fraud investigator for the Department of Sudden Departure; she interviews benefit claimants with a long questionnaire to confirm they really lost someone.

What does Wayne do for Nora in New York?

She goes home and finally says yes to a date with Kevin.

Whose baby do Kevin and Nora end up raising?

The baby is Holy Wayne and Christine's; Christine abandons the newborn in a public restroom, and Tommy leaves her on Kevin's doorstep in the season 1 finale.

What is the name of the baby the Garveys adopt?

By season 3 she is back living with her mother in Kentucky.

What was Laurie's profession before the Departure?

Laurie was a psychiatrist before the Departure; Patti Levin was one of her patients, whose fears Laurie dismissed as anxiety in 'The Garveys at Their Best'.

What does Laurie lose in the Departure, as revealed in "The Garveys at Their Best"?

Laurie loses her unborn child in the Departure; in 'The Garveys at Their Best' she watches the fetus vanish from the ultrasound screen mid-scan.

What was Kevin doing at the moment of the Departure?

At the moment of the Departure, Kevin is having sex with a stranger in a hotel room; the woman vanishes mid-act, as shown in 'The Garveys at Their Best'.

Whose stepson is Tommy?

Tommy is Kevin's stepson; Laurie had him with another man before marrying Kevin, who raised him as his own.

What do Tommy and Laurie do together in season 2?

Tommy eventually claims Wayne passed his hugging power to him.

Which drug does Kevin Sr. take in Australia before he appears on Kevin's hotel TV?

Kevin Sr. takes God's Tongue, a hallucinogen he is given in Australia; during the trip he finds himself speaking through the TV in Kevin's afterworld hotel, as he recounts in 'Crazy Whitefella Thinking'.

Who plays Kevin Garvey Sr.?

Glenn played Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

Where does season 3 move for its second half?

Season 3's second half moves to Victoria, Australia, with Nora chasing the machine to Melbourne and the series ending at a farm in the Victorian countryside; production filmed around Melbourne.

Which sitcom actor contacts Nora about a machine in season 3?

Mark Linn-Baker, playing himself, contacts Nora; in the show's world the sitcom actor faked his own departure after his three co-stars vanished, and now recruits for the machine.

What does the machine offered to Nora supposedly do?

The machine supposedly sends people to wherever the departed went, using radiation; Nora suspects it simply kills them and treats the case as fraud.

What question do the physicists ask Nora before rejecting her?

The physicists ask Nora whether she would let a child die to cure cancer; she answers yes, and they turn her away from the machine, though she later talks her way back in.

What does Nora bring to Melbourne to prove the machine a fraud?

Nora brings $20,000 in cash, the fee the machine's operators demand, to Melbourne; she tells Kevin it is a DSD fraud investigation and he insists on coming along.

Who is Grace, the woman who rescues Kevin Sr. from a snakebite?

Grace, played by Lindsay Duncan, is a former missionary who lost her whole family; her children died in the bush after she assumed they had departed. She has just drowned a policeman named Kevin.

Whom does Kevin see, or think he sees, in a Melbourne TV studio?

Laurie has to make him realise he is hallucinating.

What does the man from the hotel afterworld claim to be when Matt meets him on a ship?

The man from the hotel, David Burton, tells Matt he is God; at the end of the episode a lion aboard the ship mauls him.

What group is celebrating aboard the passenger ship Matt boards in Tasmania?

They mark the lion's lineage through mass copulation.

What illness does Matt reveal has returned in season 3?

Matt reveals his cancer, first beaten in childhood, has returned in season 3; it kills him before the finale's time jump.

What does Kevin become in his second, longer trip to the afterworld?

In 'The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)' Kevin is both the President and the President's twin, an assassin; looking into a mirror switches him between them.

Whom does Kevin Sr. want Kevin to find in the afterworld to learn the last chant?

Sunday refuses to teach it even there.

What does the ending of the twin-brothers episode imply about Kevin Sr.'s prophecy?

The episode ends with Kevin waking on the seventh anniversary as the rain stops; there was never going to be a flood, and Kevin Sr. accepts his prophecy was false.

What is the title of the series finale?

It aired on June 4, 2017.

Where does the older Nora live in the finale?

The older Nora lives under the name Sarah on a farm near a rural Australian town, keeping doves; Kevin says he has come to Australia every year looking for her.

What does the older Kevin pretend when he first turns up on Nora's doorstep?

He claims to recall only the night they met at the school dance.

What does Nora say happened when she went through the machine?

She says her family was happy there, so she came back.

Why did the writers refuse to show Nora's journey in flashback?

The writers deliberately left Nora's journey unfilmed to keep it ambiguous whether her story is true, letting viewers decide whether to believe her the way Kevin does.

Which historical event does the season 3 premiere's cold open depict?

The cold open depicts the Great Disappointment of 1844: a Millerite family climbs onto a roof in white robes awaiting Christ's return on the dates William Miller's followers predicted, and nothing happens.

Who plays David Burton, the man Kevin meets on the bridge in the hotel afterworld?

Bill Camp plays David Burton, the man from the bridge who later claims to be God; Camp also played Detective Dennis Box in HBO's The Night Of.

Who co-created the series with Damon Lindelof?

Novelist Tom Perrotta co-created the series with Damon Lindelof, adapting his own 2011 novel The Leftovers and serving as an executive producer.

Which earlier series is Lindelof best known for co-creating?

Damon Lindelof co-created Lost with J. J. Abrams and Jeffrey Lieber; it ran on ABC from 2004 to 2010, and its divisive ending shadowed The Leftovers' reception.

Whose New York Times review introduced Lindelof to the novel?

Stephen King reviewed The Leftovers in The New York Times Book Review in 2011; Lindelof has said that review led him to read the novel and pursue the rights.

Which two of the co-creator's novels became Oscar-nominated films?

He co-wrote the Little Children screenplay and got an Oscar nomination himself.

What is Kevin Garvey's job in the novel, as opposed to the show?

In the book he is a retired businessman who runs for office.

How much of the novel does the TV series cover?

Season 1 covers the entire book; seasons 2 and 3, set in Texas and Australia, are entirely original.

Who directed the pilot?

The Friday Night Lights director also did episode 2.

Which director helmed the season 1, 2 and 3 finales?

She was the first female graduate of the AFI Conservatory.

Who composed the show's score?

Max Richter composed the score, including the piano theme 'The Departure'; cues from his albums Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks, such as 'On the Nature of Daylight', also appear.

Whose song "Let the Mystery Be" opens season 2?

Iris DeMent's 1992 song 'Let the Mystery Be' became the season 2 title song and returns over the opening of the series finale.

What accompanies the season 1 title music?

Season 2 replaced it with family snapshots with the departed erased.

Which sitcom theme opens the second episode of season 3?

'Don't Be Ridiculous' opens with the Perfect Strangers theme, 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now'; every season 3 episode swapped in a different title song.

Where was season 2 filmed?

Season 3 started there too before moving to Melbourne.

Who plays Michael Murphy, Evie's twin brother?

Jovan Adepo plays Michael Murphy, the devout twin who takes Kevin to his grandfather Virgil; the role was Adepo's first major screen part.

How many episodes did the show run?

The Leftovers ran 28 episodes: two seasons of ten and a final season of eight, from June 2014 to June 2017.

What does Erika Murphy bury in a box as a wish ritual?

Erika buries a live bird in a box for three days; if it is alive when she digs it up, her wish comes true — a ritual she reveals to Nora in 'Lens'.

Which Emmy nomination did the show receive in 2017?

Ann Dowd was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in 2017 for playing Patti; it was the show's only Emmy nomination in three seasons.

Which Critics' Choice award did the show win in 2014?

The Leftovers was named a Most Exciting New Series at the 2014 Critics' Choice Television Awards; Carrie Coon later won Best Actress in a Drama Series there for playing Nora.

Eccleston is famous for playing which incarnation of the Doctor?

Christopher Eccleston played the Ninth Doctor for one series in 2005, when Doctor Who was revived, before David Tennant took over.

Dowd went on to win an Emmy as Aunt Lydia on which series?

Ann Dowd won the 2017 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, which ran on Hulu from 2017 to 2025.

Coon's next big TV role was a police chief in which anthology series?

Season 3 of Fargo, in 2017.

Which David Fincher film was Coon's screen debut?

Carrie Coon made her film debut as Margo Dunne, twin sister of Ben Affleck's character, in Fincher's Gone Girl in 2014, the year The Leftovers premiered.

Theroux worked with which director on Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire?

Justin Theroux played the director Adam Kesher in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) and returned for Lynch's Inland Empire (2006).

Laurie's actress first found fame on which police drama?

She played Detective Janice Licalsi.

Which Marvel superhero's girlfriend has Liv Tyler played?

Betty Ross in The Incredible Hulk, and again in Captain America: Brave New World.

Which actress is Jill Garvey's real-life mother?

Qualley trained as a ballet dancer before acting.

Janel Moloney is best known as Donna Moss on which series?

Janel Moloney played Donna Moss on The West Wing from 1999 to 2006, earning two Emmy nominations; on The Leftovers she plays Matt's wife Mary.

Which Marvel show cast Kevin Sr.'s actor as the blind mentor Stick?

He reprised it in The Defenders.

Jovan Adepo made his film debut in which Denzel Washington film?

Jovan Adepo made his film debut as Cory, Denzel Washington's son, in Fences (2016); he later played the young Will Reeves in Lindelof's Watchmen.

Chris Zylka played Flash Thompson in which superhero film?

Chris Zylka played Flash Thompson, Peter Parker's bully, in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) opposite Andrew Garfield; he plays Tommy Garvey on The Leftovers.

Who plays Aimee, Jill's friend who lives with the Garveys in season 1?

Emily Meade plays Aimee, Jill's friend who lives with the Garveys in season 1; Meade later starred as Lori in HBO's The Deuce.

What is the ATFEC in the show's world?

It offers to wipe out the cult in Kevin's town; he declines.

Which cult member is stoned to death in a season 1 episode named after her?

Nobody on the police force wants to investigate.

What theory does the DSD develop that gets tested on Nora in "Lens"?

The DSD tests a theory that some people are 'lenses' who cause others around them to depart; Nora, who lost her whole family, is made to answer its questionnaire.

How does Kevin die in the season 2 finale?

John shoots Kevin after Kevin tells him Evie is alive and faked her departure to join the Guilty Remnant; John refuses to believe it.

What does the town's earthquake do to Mary in the season 2 finale?

The earthquake in the season 2 finale wakes Mary from her coma; Nora, who is watching her, brings her to Matt, and Mary is awake and speaking through season 3.