120 Fun Facts About The Leftovers

On which network did The Leftovers air?

It was the first series HBO acquired from an outside studio rather than making in-house.

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?

A season 2 episode is titled "Ten Thirteen", the day before.

Roughly how many people departed?

Enough to hollow out mainstream religion and spawn new cults.

Who plays police chief Kevin Garvey?

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

Who plays Nora Durst?

It was her television breakthrough; she made her film debut for David Fincher the same year.

Who plays Reverend Matt Jamison?

The Salford-born actor was the ninth Doctor Who.

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.

Which member of Kevin's family joins the white-clad cult?

She hands him divorce papers without saying a word.

Who plays Laurie?

She had co-created and starred in Judging Amy.

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.

What does Wayne believe himself to be?

He also believes he needs teenage girls to "recharge" his powers.

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

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

Who plays Jill Garvey?

The daughter of a famous actress, she trained as a ballet dancer.

In which fictional New York town is season 1 set?

The cult's houses are burned by its townspeople in the season 1 finale.

Season 2 moves to which fictional Texas town?

Nearby Lockhart's main street stood in for it 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.

What is John Murphy's job in Texas?

He also acts as a vigilante against people exploiting the town's fame.

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?

They faked their departure and joined the cult.

Where does Kevin wake up the night the girls disappear?

He had tried to drown himself on his guide's advice, and the earthquake drained the lake.

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?

The episode is named after it.

Who is Dean?

He turns up again in Australia in season 3.

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?

Steven Williams plays him; he shoots himself instead of giving Kevin 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?

He chooses it by picking the suit from four outfits in the wardrobe.

Whose quote greets Kevin on the hotel wardrobe?

"Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly."

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

Kevin Sr. gives the advice through a flickering hotel TV from Perth.

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?

Lindelof took the idea from Die Hard's use of Beethoven.

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

Kevin collects a gun from a bathroom before a meeting, like Michael Corleone.

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

The mystery man makes him do it after he is shot.

What does the GR blow up in the season 2 finale?

Meg and Evie let the outsiders' camp flood in behind them.

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.

Who buys Matt's church out from under him?

He needed $135,000 by the foreclosure date and missed it by days.

What does Matt publish that outs local sinners?

He argues the departed were often sinners, so it 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?

John assumes Matt raped her while comatose and refuses to sponsor 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"?

Coon's performance in the episode won some of the season's strongest reviews.

What is Nora's job?

She checks whether benefit claimants 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?

Christine abandons the newborn in a public restroom; it turns up on Kevin's doorstep.

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?

Patti was one of her patients, dismissed as anxious.

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

She watches it vanish from the ultrasound screen.

What was Kevin doing at the moment of the Departure?

The woman he is with disappears mid-act.

Whose stepson is Tommy?

Kevin raised him as his own after a violent run-in with the biological father.

What do Tommy and Laurie do together in season 2?

Tommy eventually claims Wayne passed his hugging power to him.

What does Kevin Sr. learn from a chicken in Australia?

He believes chants from Indigenous tribes will stop it.

Who plays Kevin Garvey Sr.?

Glenn played Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

Where does season 3 move for its second half?

Production relocated to Melbourne in June 2016.

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

He played Larry on a 1980s sitcom whose theme opens the episode.

What does the machine offered to Nora supposedly do?

She dismisses it as pseudoscience that incinerates people.

What question do the physicists ask Nora before rejecting her?

Her answer, yes, gets her thrown out of the warehouse.

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

Kevin asks to go with her.

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

Lindsay Duncan plays her; 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?

David Burton is later mauled by a descendant of Frasier the Sensuous Lion.

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?

He dies before the finale's time jump.

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

Looking into a mirror lets him switch between the two brothers.

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 rain simply stops when he wakes.

What is the title of the series finale?

It aired on June 4, 2017.

Where does the older Nora live in the finale?

Kevin says he has looked for her every year.

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?

Lindelof said the writers privately reached a verdict but would not share it.

Which historical event, shown in the season 3 premiere, inspired the finale's time jump?

Millerites waited for a celestial event that never came.

Whom did the machine's inventor, Dr. Van Eeghen, take his name from?

Henk Van Eeghen edited on the third season.

Who co-created the series with Damon Lindelof?

The first season covers the whole of his 2011 novel.

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

Critics kept comparing the two shows, mostly favourably.

Whose New York Times review introduced Lindelof to the novel?

Lindelof was already a fan of the author's earlier books.

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?

Seasons 2 and 3 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?

Some cues come from his albums Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks.

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

It returns for 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?

Lindelof chose a different title song for every season 3 episode.

Where was season 2 filmed?

Season 3 started there too before moving to Melbourne.

Which two shows did Lindelof cite as influences on season 2's reinvention?

New town, new family, new opening titles.

How many episodes did the show run?

Two seasons of ten and a final season of eight.

Where did the show rank on Metacritic's aggregate of best shows of the 2010s?

Alan Sepinwall named each season his show of the year.

Which Emmy nomination did the show receive in 2017?

It was for the twin-brothers episode; the show was otherwise ignored by the Emmys.

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

Coon later won Best Actress in a Drama there.

Eccleston is famous for playing which incarnation of the Doctor?

He did one series in 2005 before David Tennant took over.

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

She played the character 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?

It came out the same year the show premiered.

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

He also played the villain in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

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?

It earned her two Emmy nominations.

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?

He later joined Lindelof's Watchmen.

Chris Zylka played Flash Thompson in which superhero film?

Zylka is his mother's maiden name, used as a stage name.

Where did the hotel-afterworld scenes get filmed?

Kevin returns to the same hotel in the season 2 finale.

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"?

Nora is amused to learn it rests on mysticism.

How does Kevin die in the season 2 finale?

He had told John the truth about Evie faking her departure.

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

Nora rushes her to Matt.