Actor Quentin Plair found deep questions to help build his character’s backstory and chemistry with Kathryn Hahn’s Clare Pierce in the Hulu adaptation of “Tiny Beautiful Things” by Cheryl Strayed.
The show follows Clare as she takes over an anonymous advice column called “Dear Sugar” amidst turmoil within her own family, which happens to enrich her advice. Plair plays Danny Kinkade, Clare’s husband, and the couple has an extensive history that stems from Clare discovering she’s pregnant with his child when they are much younger.
“This [role] for me, personally, was the first time I had a very intimate relationship with someone, a relationship that had years of backstory and familiarity between the two characters,” he said. “So for me portraying someone’s husband, someone’s father and those two things in our family dynamic, that was the thing that I had to work on the most was really bringing all those years of life and backstory that aren’t seen in the series, bringing that to the first day when you’re meeting all these people for the first time.”
To help the 16 years of their relationship come alive, Plair met up with Hahn before filming so they could work on that chemistry.
“We met at a park right by our house, had a hike, and I brought —I made up this set of cards [with] 32 questions to fall in love somebody, something like that. I could be wrong who did it, but I didn’t want us to have our phones so I wrote them down on flashcards,” Plair told TheWrap. “We literally just alternated who asked each other which one first so I would ask her question one first, she would answer and I’d answer to back. Initially I was thinking we’d just do that for ourselves, but she was like, Okay, well let’s do it. Not only our answers, but [for] our actual characters.’ We had organic chemistry from the chemistry read but this really helped us have something familiar so that when you see the two on screen, you think Oh, these two know each other.’”
Plair also drove Tanzyn Crawford, who plays daughter Rae, to and from set, which allowed them to get closer as well. The actor joked that he felt he became a corny older brother figure to Crawford in the process of making the show.
“I wanted Danny to be a loving husband. I wanted him to be a loving father. And so anytime you know that’s where he was acting from,” Plair said. “Everything else is just just window dressing.”
He also enjoyed the shift in tone from his most current project “Welcome to Chippendales.”
“I was really excited about a very grounded a very real gritty and a slice of life story, in a sense,” Plair said. “I was really attracted to the word that came up when I was auditioning which was, it was messy in the most beautiful way.”
All episodes of “Tiny Beautiful Things” are now streaming on Hulu.