The Making of ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’: “It’s All So Raw, and You Can Feel It”
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In Tiny Beautiful Things, some of the most powerful dialogue happens in voiceover. Kathryn Hahn’s meditations open and close most every episode, ranging in sentiment from anguished (the very first establishing shot of the series is accompanied by her character Clare Pierce’s desperate letter to the advice column Dear Sugar) to sanguine (by the final scene of the pilot, she’s dispensing advice to her 22-year-old self as Sugar). “What would I tell my 22-year-old self?” she asks. “Stop worrying whether you’re fat — feed yourself, literally. The people worthy of your love will love you more for this.”
Fitting the haphazard nature of her character, these voiceovers — that see Hahn’s character navigating her own painful divorce and grappling with all of her professional dreams deferred while attempting to pay it forward — were done in Hahn’s makeup trailer during whatever downtime they could find on set. Hahn would gather with showrunner Liz Tigelaar and the same sound department that has been with the actress for years (“since the days of Afternoon Delight and Transparent,” she says), and record the moments that tie the series together. “It was all so raw, and you can feel it,” says Hahn.
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A certain degree of rawness comes with the territory. Tiny Beautiful Things is an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s essay collection of the same name and is now streaming on Hulu. It’s an offshoot of Wild, the Reese Witherspoon-starring biopic about Strayed’s time hiking the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother’s death and a subsequent destructive spiral. In this universe, the protagonist is a more fictionalized version of Strayed, a woman whose post-loss spiral is longer and more drawn out, who never completed (or even attempted) the PCT and never became the writer she wanted to be. “I write in my column about something called The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us, about the different paths we could have taken,” explains Strayed. “Kathryn is playing the part of a sister life that I didn’t live.”
This version of Strayed sees herself at middle age, in a failing marriage with her high school sweetheart (Welcome to Chippendale’s Quentin Plair), the collapse of which is also threatening her relationship with teenage daughter Rae (played by newcomer Tanzyn Crawford). A gig writing the advice columns offers a lifeline, and a way to process her built-up grief. “She’s in this place that a lot of women can relate to, where they’re in a situation for way too long and everything in her life has been on cruise control,” says Hahn. “She has to ask, do I stay in this comfortable place where I’m always a little bit unhappy, or do I start the life I really could live?”
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The show’s roots lead all the way back to the Wild days. Witherspoon and Strayed became dear friends on the production, discussing a Tiny Beautiful Things adaptation that never got off the ground. When the actress founded Hello Sunshine, she decided to come back to the idea. Tigelaar was the showrunner on the banner’s first television project Little Fires Everywhere, but was actually first introduced to Strayed’s material through Michaela Watkins. “I was on the set of Casual with her and she was like, ‘Dear God, I listened to the most amazing podcast today,’” says Tigelaar. Adds Strayed: “Around the time I was making Wild, people in Hollywood started telling me about an actress who was obsessed with me, and they would buy a copy of Tiny Beautiful Things and have me sign them for her.” (Watkins later signed on as a guest star, playing Hahn’s best friend.)
Originally, Tiny Beautiful Things was going to be a more straightforwardly faithful adaptation of the book, with Hahn’s storyline segmented by a B-plot following the lives of the Dear Sugar letter-writers. But Tigelaar was so enamored by Strayed that she looked for a way to double down — the B-plot turned into a flashback that more closely followed her real life. Relative newcomer Sarah Pidgeon plays a young Clare, and we see her following her mother’s (played by the inimitable Merritt Wever) cancer diagnosis and death. Pidgeon is charged with more emotional responsibility than the rest of the cast, given the often devastating material of the flashback scenes and the fact that so much is pulled directly from Strayed’s most painful memories. “She’s really feeling the fullness of her grief experience, in addition to searching for some sort of meaning,” says Pidgeon. “There are some similarities between the character and myself, but I think I have too much fear to really let myself spin out in the same way.”
The current-day storyline was more crowdsourced; the writers room spent a lot of time sharing about their own lives, and elements of Strayed’s book were infused with their experiences — from the poignant to the embarrassing. (During one particularly rough patch in their marriage, Danny’s porn accidentally blasts over the house’s Bluetooth speakers, a moment that “did not come from nowhere,” laughs Tigelaar. “But I won’t name names.”) Quentin Plair, who plays Danny, also infused his own perspective. “I was really intentional about bringing what I have seen and experienced as Black fatherhood to the screen,” says Plair. “I wanted to be really truthful to the experience of being a Black American in an interracial relationship.”
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Plair and Hahn’s audition process moved lighting fast — though Tigelaar admits she had Hahn in mind for the lead, they had written nearly the entire season by the time the actress read the script for the first few episodes. The casting was set less than two weeks before principal photography began (during their chemistry read, Plair was multitasking a Welcome to Chippendales press day and Hahn was on family vacation, quite literally coming straight off the beach), so they had a handful of days to create what felt like 16 years of history. Plair’s solution: The New York Times’ 36 Questions That Lead to Love, which he had them answer as both themselves and their character.
“We went on a hike together and wrote the questions down on note cards so that we could be present and not use our phones,” he says. “We only got through, like 11 questions, because we would get sidetracked in the conversation and take hours to talk about one note card.”
Like most of Strayed’s work, the show’s material will push viewers to think about themselves — and their mothers. “Who am I?” Hahn asks in voiceover at the end of episode two. “If all else fails and nothing makes sense, I am always three things: I am my mother’s daughter, I am my daughter’s mother, and I am an accomplished writer, even if I haven’t accomplished it yet.” Pidgeon and Plair, not yet parents, found themselves spending a lot of time ruminating. Pidgeon, at 26, is still far from needing to think about that part of her future, but says her scenes forced her to realize the magnitude of parenthood, and the magnitude of heartbreak involved. Plair, a decade her senior, is quite serious about paving a path to fostering or adopting: “I came into this role with an excitement about how much I’m in love with the process of being a father.”
Hahn has a teenage daughter, so there was no avoiding the parallels to her own life. “Cheryl would talk to me about all the ways we carry our mothers with us, and ways we can purify ourselves so that we can allow our daughters — and children — to be who they are,” she says. “It’s very deep stuff.” Just as a Cheryl Strayed show should be.
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