Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling collection Tiny Beautiful Things is coming to life on the TV screen. The new series follows Clare, a struggling writer who becomes a revered advice columnist as her own life falls apart. Tiny Beautiful Things takes place in two different periods: Clare’s adult life and younger years. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with creator/EP Liz Tigelaar and Cheryl about the series, including casting Sarah Pidgeon as the younger Clare.
“David Rubin, our casting director, discovered Sarah and certainly her being on The Wilds felt very fortuitous for this project, but he really brought her to us,” Liz explained to HollywoodLife during the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “We were completely blown away by her. Her likeness to Kathryn [Hahn] but her ability to inhabit grief and loss in such a raw, unfiltered, truthful way. She’s incredibly skilled as an actress well beyond her years.”
As for Kathryn, Liz said that the WandaVision alum is someone she’s “dreamed” of working with for years. “She was somebody who always felt like a kind of prototype for Clare,” Liz said.
This is the second novel of Cheryl’s that’s been adapted. Cheryl revealed that she knew from the moment she met Liz that “she was really the one to tell this story. She knew right away what my intentions were with the column, what I was trying to do as a writer. It wasn’t to be like, ‘Listen to me. I’m so wise. I’m going to tell you what to do.’ But rather to expand our sense of what we’re capable of, expand our sense of how it is we can heal, how it is we can live with the things that feel unbearable to us. Liz has that kind of humanity in her work as well, so we were kindred spirits from the start.”
In this day and age, limited series aren’t always limited. Liz weighed in on the possibility of a second season of Tiny Beautiful Things. “I will say, I will do anything with Cheryl forever,” Liz told HollywoodLife. “I do think that it felt important in this case to tell a story, especially a mother-daughter story, with a beginning, middle, and end. That kind of had a complete and satisfying arc to it.”
