Colin Bonini Interviews Tucker Leighty-Phillips

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky and a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Arizona State University. His short story collection, Maybe This Is What I Deserve, won the 2022 Split/Lip Fiction Chapbook Contest judged by Isle McElroy. His writing also appears in Booth, Adroit Journal, The Offing, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best Microfiction and received a Notable Mention in Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where he works for Appalshop’s Roadside Theater. Learn more at TuckerLP.net.

In Spring of 2023, Colin Bonini, a past classmate of Leighty-Phillips and a former associate editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, met with former managing editor Leighty-Phillips over Zoom to talk about his most recent collection, collective acts of nostalgia, memes, movies, time theft, and more.

Colin Bonini: Your collection, Maybe This Is What I Deserve, begins with two epigraphs. One from Wong Kar-Wai about memory and subjectivity, and another from Jose Mourinho. Mourinho’s reads, “I prefer not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.” What about those lines resonate with you? How did they inform your process? And why did you want readers to encounter those lines as they entered your collection?

Tucker Leighty-Phillips: What’s funny is like, I have a couple works in progress I’ve been sitting on forever, and I’ve known what the epigraphs for those have been. There’s one specific project where two epigraphs presented themselves to me while I was on chapter one, and I was like, “Those are always going to be the epigraphs.”  For this one, I literally didn’t have epigraphs chosen until I needed to have epigraphs chosen [laughs]. 

I’ve been watching a lot of movies this year and thinking about how film intersects with literature, and I really like Wong Kar-Wai’s work. I was literally searching for epigraphs. This is how rough it got. I know other people keep a notebook with potential epigraphs, and I never did that. I had to go seek them out. Give me two seconds—I have to actually remember what the Wong Kar-Wai one is. It’s “You can always make things much better”? 

CB: Something like that! And the Mourinho one is, “I prefer not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.” And I think for me, that’s the one I’m really interested in. 

The Wong-Kar Wai quote, “One’s memories aren’t what actually happened—they’re very subjective. You can always make it much better,” seems really in line with a lot of the work you’re doing with this collection. This act of reimagining or remembering what it’s like to be younger, and sort of playing with that. But the one about not speaking, to me, felt really interesting. How did you land on that one? 

TLP: Yeah! The Wong Kar-Wai one, I think, makes a lot of sense, because I’m writing a lot of autofiction. There’s a lot of autobiographical work and writing from my own childhood and examining experiences, like growing up in Appalachia, growing up in a single-parent household, growing up in poverty. I’m trying to reframe those things and hold them to account while also trying to find hope in the grief of some of those experiences. The Mourinho quote—do you know the context for it? 

He’s a big football manager in Europe, and basically, he didn’t like a call from a referee, and knew if he said anything that he would get fined [laughs]. But it’s also almost like a meme on the internet, that quote. People use it in certain contexts, or if they’re upset at someone. And I love the idea of putting in conversation like, “I want to go and reimagine and reclaim these memories and these experiences,” but also, “Is this going to get me in trouble? Trying to do this? Or trying to reimagine?” 

I think it’s kind of playful and goofy, and also a kind of meme-y epigraph, but I really love the way the two play off each other. I had to search for it, but it made sense when I put them together. 

CB: I also feel like, for you and for this collection, the idea of opening with something that’s both a meme but also really makes sense—that feels really indicative of the work, which is so fun and joyful, but also pretty serious. That’s rad. 

Moving into some of the stories and some of the themes we see at work: one story I want to talk about is, “The Street Performer.” 

You have this awesome line, “Who is not unlike him, trying to return to their childhood home, or trying to escape it for good? Who is not crooning a song of somewhere else?” What do you think about this collection and these stories you’ve written and their relationship to the concept of “home?” How do you think different ideas of what that word might mean have informed you as a writer and informed these stories as you were writing them? As you were putting this collection together? 

TLP: That’s a good question, because I think most of the collection was written between 2019 and 2021, which overlaps with my time in Arizona, which is a place that, sadly, I always saw as a temporary home, you know? It was always going to be a place where I was only living for a brief period of time. Which is maybe true of all places. But [in Arizona] I could sense that I was plotting my next steps—whether that was back to the east coast, back to Kentucky where I grew up, back to Pennsylvania, which I have a real familial relationship with. 

With a lot of these stories, I was away from places that I considered home, and I was trying to recontextualize them, and maybe romanticize them a bit. I think any time you leave a place, you start to idealize the strangest parts of it. Certain buildings you maybe never went into, people you maybe didn’t spend time with when you were there, but now you’re like, “Ah, I should’ve!” I think I was in a headspace of trying to imagine what was next, or if I could go back to somewhere that felt comfortable to me. I don’t know if that emerged in the stories.

And I think, too, I play a lot with nostalgia. I was doing it not just for physical spaces, but also for time periods. Even time periods that were hard on me, or ones I would not return to if actually given the choice. 

CB: You just brought up how you grew up in Kentucky, how you have a good relationship with Pennsylvania, then you were in Arizona—so you’ve been around a little bit. But you have that essay in Wig-Wag about how when you left your home in Kentucky, you realized how tied you are to place and the regions you were from. 

In this collection, there’s not one clear setting, but you do, for example, set “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies” in Occurrence, Kentucky. When you were writing these, were you imagining the narrators in the stories to be indicative of certain regions, certain peoples? Areas and places that you’re from? Or is it a little more nebulous?

TLP: In the last couple years I’ve fallen in love with the movie American Movie because it’s a documentary about people, and it’s a documentary about craft and filmmaking, but it’s also so heavily place-based just by the chance of being in a place, if that makes sense. They’re not trying to tell a story of the Midwest or Milwaukee or Wisconsin, it just happens that the people and the place are so influenced by each other. 

That’s something I’ve been thinking about as I go back and reexamine my work. What are the parts of it that are very accidentally Kentuckian? Or accidentally Appalachian? There’s one story in the collection where I refer to a shopping cart as a “buggy,” and one of my friends reached out and was like, “I cannot believe that you call them buggies.” And that’s something I hadn’t really thought about. I’ve just called it that, and I liked the way it sounded in the line, so I kept it. I didn’t realize regional dialect was influencing the story. 

There were places I tried to be intentional about it. Like, if you’re looking at the landscape of rural America, especially the rural South, dollar stores play a significant role. I think, at this point, sadly, they’re as much a part of mountain life as the mountain themselves. You see them everywhere. So there were places where I really, really tried to make the stories feel populated in a way I identified with, and then there were ways that it implicitly felt like a specific place just by proximity of having grown up there and being super familiar and habitual, you know? 

CB: Got it, got it. I really like that answer a lot. The idea that writing based on your own experiences and your own upbringing gives you responsibility to those places. And a familiarity with them. 

I want to talk about form a little bit. It seems like you had a lot of fun with form in the collection. We’ll start sort of small: a lot of the stories in this collection are single paragraphs. I want to know how you see the paragraph, as a unit, as a vehicle for story. What does working in such a confined space allow for? What does it constrict?  How does it make you push boundaries? How are you looking at the paragraph when you write such short pieces of fiction?

TLP: Yeah… it’s a good question, and it’s a really hard question. I’ve done a couple of interviews with people, and they want me to talk about what flash fiction or microfiction does that long-form fiction can’t do, and… I don’t care about that [laughs]. I have no interest in putting them in competition. I gravitate more towards one than the other, maybe, and there’s no specific reason why. 

But I do think for me, literally, the interest in the short form was born out of time theft at work [laughs]. When I first got into reading literary journals, I was working a bunch of jobs I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Mostly service industry jobs. If I could sneak away to the bathroom for a little bit and kill some time or steal some time, I wanted to. I discovered Wigleaf and a couple of other journals—Wigleaf was the big one, so I’m only going to mention them by name specifically—where, you know, they’re publishing things that are 250, maybe 800 words, and I could read it while I was hidden away in a walk-in fridge or, like, in the bathroom. 

I think I identified with microfiction and flash fiction as, like, the working-class form, because I could engage with it in a way that I didn’t have time for with a full novel. Or I didn’t want to dedicate that time. I think that translated to when I started writing; I wanted to commit myself to that form because I thought maybe I could also be part of this larger network of—trying to write the pieces that someone, somewhere else, hidden away inside a walk-in fridge, is trying to steal away to read.   

CB: That’s awesome. 

TLP: In terms of the actual craft itself, I don’t know! I’ve gone back and forth with how I approach it. There were stories I’ve written where I wanted to tell a full chronological narrative in the space of a paragraph. Sometimes that came naturally to me, and sometimes that seemed completely foreign to me. I’m trying to think of what to compare it to. It’s like I was—this might be bad storytelling!—but it’s like I was trying to capture the memory of a previous chronological story, you know? What was the palate-cleanser mint of after the events? I don’t know, I approach each one differently, and I think it’s based off of what feels most natural to me. This isn’t the best answer. I feel like I get caught up in just trying to do it without thinking of what it can do [laughs].

CB: I really love it! I like the idea of you working in a service industry job, and everyone else is sneaking away to do whatever, and you’re, like, reading something. I like that! It’s like little bumps of flash fiction. 

This kind of segues into my next question. You’re talking about flash as a form. Right? Beyond just writing in short doses, like single paragraphs and really short stuff, you break form a few times in this collection. The story I’m thinking of is “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies,” which is written as a Wikipedia article. You have another story which kind of reminded me of a prose poem, in the way it looks on the page and the dedication to Michael Martone—I’ve seen a lot of poems doing that. Do you think working in flash has a special relationship with form-breaking? 

TLP: I think it can. I think there’s a really tight relationship to it, because I think the—I even hesitate to call it the flash community—but there’s a big emphasis on circles doing flash fiction of the hermit crab. In both fiction and non-fiction, there’s the hermit crab essay and the hermit crab story, which are trying to find space for “literary writing” in written words that are not always deemed “literary.” If you do a quick search on the internet, you’ll find stories written in the form of paint swatches and the description of the paint colors; or you’ll find a recipe that tells a story; or the statistics on the back of a baseball card. I’ve tried to do some of that. I get tired of it really easily. I think I drift away from it, or I’ll start to try something in a form, and then I’ll be like, “Ah, let’s do something else.“ 

I wrote another story with the dedication to Michael Martone, because Michael Martone has influenced me in looking for the “literary” in spaces that are not literary. Or, like, reimagining what literary fiction can do. I think he’s done it with a lot of really funny forms that I’ve found made writing playful when I was desperately in need of making writing playful again. I wanted to try that, where I dedicated it to him and used the dedication as a space for play. It was published in a magazine, and he emailed me the same day and was like, “Very interesting,” [laughs] which I took to be the ultimate compliment. That somehow it made its way to him, and he was kind about it. But it was weird to write a story embodying a living human being that didn’t know they were going to be in the story. I was really nervous, but I think that he responded to it well. 

CB: That’s cool! I guess while we’re here: I’m not super familiar with Michael Martone, but I know he played with form, like you said, and making it playful, but he also played with fake autobiography and false biography. Which is another thing that you do. 

In “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies,” Tucker Leighty-Phillips is this semi-villainous, very dubious, out-of-towner playwright. In “Tucker Leighty-Phillips Two: The Sequel,” the “original cast” is an out-of-date, left-behind film star. But it’s you! It’s Tucker. My question is: what ideas are you trying to flush out when placing yourself into a story? Is it difficult for you to step away from your own identity and make yourself a character? Are you doing that at all? Or are you secretly the star of Tucker Leighty-Phillips: The Movie?

TLP: [Laughs] I don’t know. The Wikipedia story was born out of a concept. It was written around the time I was applying for jobs in Kentucky, and I’ve always had this fear of coming back to Kentucky and being seen as an outsider, even though I regard it as home. I have this weird fear of people from my hometown feeling abandoned by me moving away. Which is putting on way too much pressure. No one loves me that much, to feel abandoned. You know? Like, there are people that love me, but nobody is going to have that emotional response. 

But I was really afraid of it for a long time; that there were people who were going to feel betrayed because I moved away. Or, you know, because I’m coming back as a completely different person than I was a decade ago. I didn’t want to feel like a holier-than-thou city-slicker who left, got a couple degrees, and… I didn’t want to feel like I was better than people. That story was born out of the fear of, “I’m coming back, and I’m imposing some version of myself that is actually detrimental to the communities I care about.” 

So I tried to make it a playful thing. I explored it, and I saw a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin as a fun way to explore that concept. I think it came together well. The second story that uses my own name was less fueled by actual emotions and just an interest in the idea of announcing a sequel of myself as a person [laughs].

CB: Right on. I really love both of those. I remember when I was going through the collection and I saw “Tucker Leighty-Phillips Two: The Sequel,” I think my note on the document is something like, “hahaha wtf dude—yes!” 

TLP: [Laughs] That’s awesome. 

CB: You’ve been talking a little bit about “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies,” and Rumpelstiltskin is a fairytale many people are familiar with. It seems like a lot of your stories are surreal or absurd or magical, and they have fabulist-fairytale-fable vibes to them. There’s a Rumpelstiltskin retelling put on by middle-schoolers, but also “Catfish Wishing Well”—kissing a catfish and getting a wish in your mouth—the silver-taloned monster, “Tick’s Hair House.” There’s a lot of non-real stuff.

When do you find these non-realist elements help you take a story somewhere it couldn’t go otherwise, and what do they help you explore? Which is a big question. 

TLP: It is a big question! It’s also the essay I’ve been plotting for a hot minute [laughs]. So it’s a great question. 

When I first started writing, I went through what maybe everyone goes through, and I was like, “I don’t know what to write about, so I’m just going to write anecdotes from my own life and change the names.” You know? I was heavily autobiographical, very on-the-nose. In some cases, that gave me a chance to start, and it gave me a platform to learn elements of story and branch out from there. Then there were times where I was trying to write about an experience, and I couldn't unlock it. It wasn’t working, or I was putting too much pressure on it because it was a life event or an experience that was important to me, and I wanted to make the story feel equivalent emotionally to the experience itself. Which, maybe, it’s never going to. It’s the same way that you take a photo of a sunset. The sunset is gorgeous; the photo will be fine. It’s never going to match up to the sunset itself. 

I found with some of those ideas or feelings or experiences, if I went heavily into absurdism or into making them fantastical, it unlocked a level of removed-ness or a space for play that made writing those stories come more easily and feel more enriched. There are stories in the collection where I’m pretty straightforward about my experience. When I look back at those, I’m like, “I wonder what those would have looked like if I had tried the fantastical thing on them.” But then when I look at [“Midge Woke to Discover She’d Become a Lightning Bug”], which is about a girl who wakes up and discovers she has a lightning bug’s gelatinous pouch and feels self-conscious about it, I was able to explore my own relationship with my body, my teenage puberty, feeling weird about myself, and who I was physically as a person through this funny, playful, almost punchline-y space. It made me feel happier with the thing I created, and also still let me engage with those actual emotions. 

CB: I have a question about humor that I feel like kind of segues from what you just said about having this punchline-y space to explore. There are a lot of tonal shifts in your collection, but not in a whiplash-y way. You’ll have a small story that’s super tender, and then you’ll have the next one be pretty devastating; but you have a line of humor and joy running through the whole collection. 

How do you find ways to insert humor into trying moments, and why do you think it’s important? And also, just for recs: Who do you go to when you need a laugh? What authors, what films? Where are you pulling humor from in your life? 

TLP: Oh, those are both good. 

I’m very much a social chameleon. I codes-witch really hard. There are some people I’m really vulnerable and thoughtful and sincere with, and then there are other people who I’m kind of ironic with and hold at an arm’s length and lean on jokes rather than intimacy. But humor is the connecting thread. 

In my everyday life, I’m past the point of wanting to be the class clown, but I’ve found that humor is a way for me to disarm people. When I was younger, and was at the risk of being bullied, I could use humor as a way to connect with the would-be bully to build a friendship out of a space where I was actually afraid or anxious. I’ve always leaned on humor with my family and in my love life, and I think I always will fall back on that as a space for me to feel comfortable. And sometimes I think I lean on it too heavily to the point where it can actually cause problems [laughs]. But that has always been a connecting thread for me, trying to find humor in things. 

So, it feels true to self that the collection as a whole can code switch and go from really vulnerable and soft and intimate to ironic and kind of, like, sarcastic. But still letting jokes and comedy have a space in there so even if it’s at a low point, you’re feeling some level of dynamism to it. 

As for personal humor… where do I go? My girlfriend Rachel and I watch a lot of Frasier. Like a lot of Frasier. Recently we’ve also been watching a lot of Cary Grant movies, and that’s been really enjoyable. I was never a film guy. I always wanted to know about film, but not be a film guy. I used to say I didn’t care about anything pre-1950. I made a joke about how I assumed everything pre-1950 was just people tossing bags of coins at each other and dumping buckets of fish heads out the window. I was like, “Not for me!” 

I think I was saying that as a way of admitting I don’t know anything about history—again, using humor to disarm—but I’ve started watching old Hollywood films with Rachel, and they’ve just made me appreciate old movies more. They haven’t complicated any feelings of anything [laughs].

CB: But I feel like having that new historical knowledge or new cultural knowledge of what film used to be, that’s going to come in handy. Right? And for somebody who’s saying, “I’m a film guy but not a film guy,” you did write an essay about a movie. That got published. That did happen. 

TLP: [Laughs]. True. 

CB: Something I absolutely loved about this collection is that you really captured a lot of what it means to be a kid. I could feel it. What it was like to be younger. Elementary and middle school. How kids face so many thresholds on a day-to-day basis. They have to cross so many spaces, and they have to cope in different ways. They have to find joy in different ways. They have to protect themselves in different ways, right? How did you remember those details about what being a kid was like? Is it ever hard to pull yourself back out of that nostalgia? 

TLP: When I first started writing, I felt like I didn’t have adult experiences, but I had childhood experiences. I don’t know if that makes sense. I started writing when I was twenty-five, and I was in my first or second semester going back to college. It was probably even later than that. My adult life had been, like, I worked a job I didn’t like for forty hours a week. I got home and  relied on vices I shouldn’t have relied on. I figured, from an adulthood threshold, I had nothing interesting to say. 

The more I went back and examined childhood—and this was at the boom of the online remember-the-90s craze, where people were posting, you know, the Muzzy commercial or Lisa Frank bookbinders, and they were like, “Remember this!?” There was this whole fascination with finding the most obscure element of childhood we all remembered or related to. That was going on in online circles at the same time I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write about. 

I knew I had my own versions of that, speaking to specific experiences.When I sat down to write about the first time I went to a house that had two refrigerators, I was like, “That was a weird thing for me.” I didn’t realize that. And then it turned into a commentary on other things. I didn’t know I was doing that, but as I started to write more, I pieced it together. Like, “Hey, I might be telling a collective story through all these little blips.” 

I’ve always been interested in childhood in narrative. There’s a whole different kind of tension, and there’s a whole different world of wonder when you’re a kid, because nothing’s habitual yet. Nothing’s familiar. And when you’re writing, one of the first things that really gets impressed on you is defamiliarization—trying to write the normal in an unusual way so it’s interesting to the reader. And when you’re a kid, everything’s unusual. It felt like a space for a lot of play for me emotionally, but also from a craft standpoint. There are people I really admire who have done this really well and have captured the tension and beauty and wonder of childhood that I am trying to emulate and exist in a lineage of. 

CB: Awesome. I think you do a great job; I think you’re nailing it. I’m glad you talked about “Clem’s Second Refrigerator,” the story. I had a whole question about that idea of making something that might seem familiar to one person seem unfamiliar. You covered all that ground, which is beautiful. 

I’ve got maybe two more questions, does that sound good? How’re you doing? Is your brain fried?

TLP: I’m good! I’m ready. 

CB: Beautiful. This book is so cool because it’s a small book filled with small stories, but it covers so much ground. Something going on with a lot of the kids’ stories, I felt, is a disconnect between the children and adults. A lot of the stories where children and adults are together are about a disconnect in what one person wants or what one person understands. But there are also stories purely about adults disconnecting. Romantic partners, friends. There’s “In Sickness and In…,” which is about two people who can’t really make a relationship work. You have “The Year We Started Dancing.” What is it that you think is keeping your characters from connecting with each other, in those stories? How is it similar or different to the way the children and the adults can’t connect? 

TLP: That’s a good question I have to think about. Because I think the two stories you specifically named—if I’m trying to put them in conversation—those are two stories about romantic partnerships that have become habitual, or have become familiar or routine in some way, and then, at some point, one of those people wants to break the routine. I think that’s kind of true for a lot of relationships. There’s always a point where maybe one person is satisfied and is like, “This is comfortable. I enjoy this.” And then there’s one person who says, “This is not enough,” or “This has become too routine.” 

I don’t think I’m directly trying to write about that. Maybe I am. I often fear… I really love comfort. I traveled and moved around a lot and lived in a lot of places in a short period of time, and I think at some point I wanted to nest. I really enjoy nesting, and I enjoy being comfortable, and I enjoy being in one place. 

CB: I totally understand, as somebody who’s starting to get that.

TLP: Yeah! You burn yourself out, I think. Maybe those stories are me examining my fears of, “Oh, am I wanting to be comfortable too quickly? In a way that could damage my prospects?” Romantically or otherwise. But I don’t know! I don’t think I set out to write something that was doing that, but it’s definitely a different approach from the way I write the tension between children and adults. I think that the tension is very different when it’s adult and adult. 

CB: Got it, got it. What I was talking about earlier, with you covering so much ground in this collection—part of it is that the subject matter is super different from story to story. In one story, you’ll be talking about childhood friendships—which are very serious—but that’s only one realm of living. Then, in another story, you’re talking about adults trying to make something work, and it’s not. And that’s just… that’s life. It’s the whole spectrum. 

Okay. I lied. I said two more questions before, but now we actually have two more questions, because they’re important to me. 

There’s a lot of pretending in this collection. Kids pretending cats are aliens, or pretending to be working at an airport; street performers pretending to be streets. Why do so many of your characters pretend to be other things? What do you think they’re searching for in those pretendings? Is it escapism? Is there a power in pretending? How do you look at that verb: pretend?

TLP: I think in some of the stories, especially the ones with kids, you pretend because it comes naturally to you. There’s so many spaces that can offer so many things—everything is multiplicitous. There’s the ongoing joke: You buy the big expensive toy for your kid, and they want to play with the box. The box represents a multitude of things, where the toy you got them represents one thing. There’s a sort of sensible, natural space for children to pretend. Which then comes out in the stories. In others, I think the pretending is a space to get away from something you’re trying not to think about or reckon with, and I think there are some stories where pretending is not an act of play but is an act of protection. Trying to find that. 

It's weird that pretending can be a fun, joyful thing, but it can also be a shield you wield, you know? I think it’s doing both in my work. I like that it can be used for comedy and tragedy. It’s a space where both can happen. 

CB: I really love that. Last question: I want to talk about both the differences and similarities of the first story in the collection, and the last story. Both are stories of children hiding or escaping from adults—from fathers, specifically. The first story is the beginning of playtime; this kid goes into the jungle-gym situation at McDonald’s or something, and he has this great time. Then the final story is the end of a game, right? The father comes home, and the children try to hide. 

By the time readers get to the last story, what is something you would want them to understand that they maybe didn’t understand at the beginning of this collection? About that idea of children and play? Their relationship to the world and to adults? 

TLP: I chose those two stories as opener and closer specifically because they directly say they’re beginning and ending. I liked the relationship there. 

I was listening to this podcast recently that talked about nostalgia as an inherently conservative concept, because it’s the idea of romanticizing something from the past, and maybe being resistant to change because, like, “Oh, well what about this old way? That’s better!” It was also tied into MFAs and individualism and the MFA’s relationship to the CIA and all that shit. [laughs]. I was thinking about that a lot recently. All of these stories had already been written. But I was thinking, “How do I make nostalgia be a tool of collective experience rather than individual experience? And is it even possible?” Because the whole concept of nostalgia is built around… It’s literally built around perception. It’s built around a singular idea of, “This is what I remember.” Which is why, when you bring up an event or a place or something that used to exist, sometimes two people can have wildly different memories of what that place or event meant for them. So it’s hard to break the individual nature of it. That’s an answer for my future writing. 

With this collection, my goal was really that I wanted to showcase a different, if possible, angle of Appalachia and of the South. I don’t know. I think my goal is: if people read it, and like it, and like me, great! [Laughs]. 

CB: Honestly! That’s perfect. I thought that answer about nostalgia was great. Nostalgia was something I definitely felt in this collection, and I didn’t have a question about it, even though it felt so central to what the stories are. It works. 

Very last question: Who was recast as Tucker Leighty-Phillips in Tucker Leighty-Phillips II: The Sequel?

TLP: Oh! Oh. Well, probably someone younger, at this point. I’m on the wrong side of thirty [Laughs]. I would say, probably…Timothée Chalamet.

CB: Beautiful! 

TLP: But he probably turned it down! He probably turned it down, and then they went to their second choice, which was, like, someone from the Hallmark channel.