The Last Letter From Your Lover tells a grounded love story, but is it based on a true story? The movie's plot points, which love letters, complicated relationships, and extramarital affairs, are completely realistic ideas that could have easily stemmed from real life — but the Netflix movie's actual inspiration may come as a surprise.
The Last Letter From Your Lover follows cynical journalist Ellie (Felicity Jones) as she's tasked with writing an article about the late editor of her paper. In her research, she finds a love letter from someone referred to as "J" from another person identified as "Boot." The movie subsequently flashes back to the mid-1960s in which "J" — Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley) — recovers from amnesia and engages in a passionate extramarital affair with Anthony O'Hare (Callum Turner), aka Boot. The movie continues to jump back and forth between each timeline, showing an examination of love across the years.
The Netflix movie is based on the novel The Last Letter From Your Lover by Jojo Moyes. The original novel is completely fictional, with its story and characters having no ties to real life. But a real-life event did spur Moyes to come up with the idea for the novel: a conversation between strangers at a restaurant.
While her novel may be fictional, Moyes told CBS News in 2011 that a conversation between a group of women at a cafe inspired her novel. She overheard a group of women trying to decipher a text message to decide if a man had feelings for one of the women in the group. While she was listening in on that conversation, Moyes was thinking about how her 20-something your old cousin said she had never received a love letter before. That got Moyes thinking that thanks to technology, the art of writing a physical love letter was probably dead. At this time, Moyes already had the urge to write an old-school romance novel. These colliding thoughts eventually led to the birth of The Last Letter From Your Lover.
Moyes' idea with The Last Letter From Your Lover was to prove just how romantic love letters can be and that the current generations are missing out, thanks to technology. She effectively channeled that idea into the Last Letter From Your Lover character of Ellie. Jones' character exists in the movie's modern timeline and is completely cynical about love, but watching Jennifer's love story unfold over pen and paper softens her heart. Technology won't be going away any time soon, it's just going to get more advanced; yet, Moyes' inspiration for The Last Letter From Your Lover shows that people still have a taste for the old-fashioned ways of romance.