Yahoo News Wild author Cheryl Strayed on adapting essay collection Tiny Beautiful Things with Kathryn Hahn
Cheryl Strayed knows what it's like to have stories from her life play out on screen. In 2014, her book Wild was turned into a feature film, one that landed Reese Witherspoon an Oscar nomination for portraying Strayed as she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Now, almost 10 years later, another of Strayed's works, Tiny Beautiful Things, is being turned into a television show. The collection of essays comes from a time when Strayed wrote an advice column for online literary magazine The Rumpus, each essay a response to a reader's question.
With Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere) as showrunner, the series follows Kathryn Hahn's Claire as she struggles to figure out what she's doing with her life, all the while still dealing with the trauma of losing her mother at a young age. And through her advice column, she's able to move toward healing.
EW spoke with Strayed and Tigelaar about bringing this story to the small screen. Check out the conversation below.
Frank Micelotta/Hulu Liz Tigelaar and Cheryl Strayed
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did this come together?
CHERYL STRAYED: It really was an idea that was just born out of having so much fun on Wild with Reese. We were chatting and I said, "Gosh, I just feel like Tiny Beautiful Things could be a TV show." At the time I didn't have any specific ideas, so we proceeded from there and took a couple different paths, and it wound its way beautifully down the mountain in the direction of Liz Tigelaar. Reese called me up one day and she said, "I have the perfect showrunner." That's where our friendship and collaboration began.
LIZ TIGELAAR: I had been so moved by Cheryl's writing. I had read Tiny Beautiful Things and I started just obsessively listening to her Dear Sugar podcast. So Cheryl's voice was in my head. It's always scary to meet somebody who you just have a one-sided connection [with] — you love them so much and they have no idea who you are. But Cheryl is everything you would hope and then a million times more. The show has been a gift, but just Cheryl herself has been such a gift in my life.
STRAYED: I feel the same way about Liz. It was amazing to see the way that she started to conceive the show and this character of Claire/Sugar. We had some early conversations about this idea of structuring what in real life we call a "woman," and in Hollywood we call a "complicated woman." And so we structured this "complicated woman" who is at this crossroads in her life. So many things were falling apart, and essentially she was reckoning with the fact that she never did answer that call that she had deep within her to be a writer. And finally in the form of giving other people advice, she was taking her own advice and becoming Dear Sugar. And we knew that this character would be a lot like me, but also very fictional.
Jessica Brooks/Hulu Kathryn Hahn in 'Tiny Beautiful Things'
I did want to touch on that. In Wild, Reese played you, but in this, Kathryn isn't playing you. Why did you make that decision?
STRAYED: Even though it's true that Reese definitely played me in Wild, that was me at 26 and younger. And that's very different than being like, "Okay, come on up to Portland, Kathryn, let me show you how it really goes around here at the dinner table, and then we're going to reenact that on TV." It would be a different kind of endeavor and I think a less interesting one. The character of Claire, she and I have deep things in common, but what Liz often says is our Claire is like Cheryl if she hadn't hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, if she hadn't written Torch and Wild and actually answered that call that we see Kathryn finally answering as Claire. So we're the same, and then our paths diverged.
TIGELAAR: We also thought of it as waving to your sister life from shore. That's the spirit of this. And of course, it gave us the freedom to explore a fictionalized version of a character who shared Cheryl's past but made different choices that led to a different present. It also gave her a particularly relatable journey. Maybe I just say this being the age of Claire, but I think a lot of people face getting to a certain age in your life and feeling the weight of time bearing down and think, "Have I done what I intended to do? Have I become who I wanted to become?"
STRAYED: On that level, we were interested in telling a story about a woman in middle age. If we had decided to make it more replicate my life, I started writing the Sugar column when I was 41. My kids were little. And we were really interested in having a mother who was parenting a teenager instead of young kids, a woman who had been married for a good while, and had settled into that kind of monogamy for well over a decade. Some of the questions that Liz and I were curious about as writers sort of gave way to this idea of making Sugar slightly older than I was when she started writing the column.
How did casting Kathryn Hahn come about?
TIGELAAR: I feel like for everyone, Kathryn is a prototype in terms of, you can almost never not be thinking of her. But we didn't write this for Kathryn. She came into the show once we had all the episodes, pretty much once we had the series broken. But she was this kind of north star dream person. And so when we heard she might be interested, it was this, "Oh my God, are you serious?!"
STRAYED: What's been so cool to see is every single person, when I say, "Oh, the show stars Kathryn Hahn," they all say, "Oh my God, I love Kathryn Hahn." It speaks to her absolute accomplishment and talent as an actress. People see themselves in her. She can be just both funny and dead serious and dramatic and crazy and chaotic, and she can convey the whole range of all of our emotions. What a gift that she said yes.
Jessica Brooks/Hulu Merritt Wever and Kathryn Hahn in 'Tiny Beautiful Things'
You also have Sarah Pidgeon playing a young Claire, and Merritt Wever as Claire's mom.
STRAYED: Yeah, we felt so lucky. It mattered to me so much, the person who played the character based on my mom, because those scenes between Merritt and Sarah are very autobiographical. I mean, incredibly close to, in many cases, exactly what happened as I remember it. And the stakes are always incredibly high when that happens. It mattered a lot that the writing was right and that the acting was right, and that the energy and the essence that they exuded was right, and they all knocked it out of the park.
Cheryl, do you find that there's almost a level of catharsis to experiencing certain life experiences over in a different form for you?
STRAYED: Yeah. I feel like it's my own personal individualized form of therapy called reenactments. I'm going to open an institute of reenactments. It'll be a film set, we'll have it on the Disney lot, and it'll be like, "Welcome to your life." We'll have you write down the five most traumatic things that have happened to you and the five most beautiful things. And then we'll hire actors to play them out. [Laughs]
TIGELAAR: There were times when we would be stuck and we'd be like, "What could this be?" And Cheryl would be like, "Well, I don't know if this is helpful, but at Summer Solstice, we didn't have air conditioning. So mom would take us outside with a sleeping bag and just land under the stars and this field of horses. And then they would come and they'd sniff our hair and put their muzzles on our faces."
STRAYED: I love how whenever Liz tells this story, she says, "She didn't have air conditioning." We didn't have electricity. [Laughs]
TIGELAAR: I love hearing the details of Cheryl's life. They're so unique and singular, and there's so many stories. I've never met anybody with more of an ability to remember the details. So there was so much, there still is so much. You could make eight seasons of Tiny Beautiful Things and tell every story of Cheryl.
This is a limited series, but if the chance were to come up, is this a story you all would be interested in continuing?
TIGELAAR: I would do this show for the rest of my life. Some things are jobs and some things are experiences. This has been an experience. This has been an incredibly moving, wonderful, enriching experience. So yeah, as long as Hulu will have us, we'll be here.
STRAYED: Sign us up. There are a lot of things in Tiny Beautiful Things.
TIGELAAR: I think that the show has a beautiful mother-daughter arc to it that has a completeness to it. But I think the intention is never to imply that any story is wrapped up in a bow. Everything leads to more, every hurdle, every nut you crack open leads to a repercussion of being cracked open and unleashes something else. So however that looks, we're here, we're available.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Tiny Beautiful Things premieres Friday, April 7, on Hulu.
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