How Cheryl Strayed’s Life Inspired Kathryn Hahn’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ Hot Tub Scene with Tim Roth

Tiny Beautiful Things Episode 7 “Go” features a major guest star who shows up to rock Clare’s (Kathryn Hahn) sense of self. Tim Roth guest stars in the Hulu show as Hayes MacKeown, a famous writer whom Clare believes sent her a compliment when she was a young writer. Clare is able to meet her idol at a hoity toity writers’ retreat and the experience shifts her understanding of her own talent, for better or for worse.

In Tiny Beautiful Things Episode 7, we learn that one reason why Clare feels like such a failure as a writer is because she once sent her work to Hayes MacKeown. The flattering letter he sent back is her greatest possession and the source of her shame. However, by sharing a hot tub with her hero, Clare soon learns that, uh, actually he never read her work. The encouraging letter came instead from his ex-wife.

Tiny Beautiful Things is inspired by the works of former “Dear Sugar” columnist and series EP Cheryl Strayed. When Decider spoke with Strayed, she revealed that the idea for the MacKeown encounter came from her real life. While working with the Tiny Beautiful Things writers’ room over Zoom, someone noticed that Strayed had a framed photo on her wall.

“On the wall behind my desk is a letter from Alice Munro which she wrote to me when I was in my early 20s, and it’s really one of my most treasured items. She’s my favorite writer,” Strayed said. “I have never had the kind of hot tub experience with Alice Munro, unfortunately, but that was kind of the beginning. I think I shared the letter with the room and they were like, ‘Okay, what if [Clare] goes to this conference to work with this man who she thinks really loved her work enough to write to her and then it turns out that it was his wife?’ And so we just got to have a lot of fun writing that scene.”

Tiny Beautiful Things EP and showrunner Liz Tigelaar credited the specificity of the letter being written on a menu to series writer Ellen Fairey who pulled it from her own life to lend the episode’s writer Deborah Shaw Gibson.

“Of course people ask me, ‘How is this autobiographical? Where are you in the show?’ I’m all over it,” Strayed said. “But it’s also true that the writers of this show are everywhere in it. There are all these little details that we share in the room that end up in the show.”

Tigelaar also revealed that the hot tub scene “was one of our hardest scenes to edit”

“Everyone was all over the hot tub,” Tigelaar said. “Nobody said the same lines twice. It was so funny, the ad libs.”

Tiny Beautiful Things star Kathryn Hahn didn’t mention improvising in the scene to Decider, but she did say that working with Tim Roth was a “a bucket list” experience. For Claire, that moment provided a much-needed “loosening of shame.”

“I think that she had so much shame and embarrassment about being a failure that I think, there was something in him saying that he doesn’t — that I didn’t even cross his path in any way, like I was a ghost to him. I had never even occurred to him,” Hahn said. “That there was something so remarkable, that of course, the narcissism of youth.”

“I was able to finally break through that narcissism. There was just a loosening of the ego that kind of allowed me into the next chapter of my life.”