Merritt Wever Explains Why She Had to 'Strengthen' Herself to Play Kathryn Hahn's Mom in 'Tiny Beautiful Things'

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from "Love", the series finale limited "Tiny Beautiful Things", now streaming on Hulu.

Hulu's "Tiny Beautiful Things" ends on a serene note, with a hospital bed in the middle of a horse pasture and a single word spoken: "love".

The moment is one of the few shared between Kathryn Hahn and Merritt Wever in the limited series, which is based on the life of author Cheryl Strayed and the time she spent writing an advice column called "Dear Sugar".

Wever plays Frankie, the free-spirited mother of Hahn's character Clare, who (like the Strayed's mother) died suddenly of lung cancer at the age of 45. The story is mostly set in the present day as an adult Clare (played by Hahn) grapples with the trauma of losing her mother, while Wever's character exists in flashbacks to the 1990s when Clare had the twenties and was played by Sarah Pidgeon.

The finale's flashbacks largely focus on the day Clare wasn't alongside of Frankie when she died, just seven weeks after being diagnosed. Instead, Clare left the hospital to reunite with her brother Lucas (Owen Painter), who feared seeing their mother's failing health in her final moments.

"Tiny Beautiful Things" ends with Clare imagining her mother's hospital bed in the pasture where Frankie had taken her children several times to see a neighbor's horses. The quiet, dreamlike sequence allows Clare to experience the moment she never had - alongside her mother, returning the last word Frankie could find for her daughter: "love".

Courtesy of Hulu

Looking back at the scene, two-time Emmy winner Wever candidly recounts Varietyshe doesn't think it's among her best work.

"It's gorgeous, and my honest experience of it has been to not really do a good job , and to choose, practice and fail with grace,” she says.

When asked why, Wever says she and Pidgeon spent production learning together how to carry the emotional weight of Strayed's personal love affair with his mother. When it came time to do the scene with Hahn, she says she didn't feel like she had the same amount of practice to do the moment justice.

"I remember having to stabilize and fortify myself against this kind of energy and love,” she says.

We spoke to Variety about filming this scene with the Hahn" electric," the bond she formed with Pidgeon, and why it wasn't "Tiny Beautiful Things," but rather Strayed's famous memoir "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail," that inspired her. helped get to know Frankie.

You have stellar taste for TV roles, mostly with recent limited series like "Unbelievable and “Godless.” And you're joining Apple TV+'s “Severance” for its upcoming second season. What are you looking for in TV roles, and why “Tiny Beauti...