Creator-director Tracie Laymon has a great deal of Bobs in her life.
First, there was Bob Laymon, her father.
“In 2012, I was searching for my dad,” she says. “He would merely actually really feel disrespected for even basically probably the most minor infractions, and he’d disappear for a yr or two and by no means converse to me. So I put his establish into Fb and observed this little tiny picture. I friended him and woke as a lot as ‘Bob Laymon likes it.’ I was like, ‘My dad likes one factor of mine! We’re once more! It’s gonna be okay.’”
It wasn’t okay however. This was a second Bob Laymon.
“It was a stranger in Wichita, Kansas,” Laymon says, “who continued to be further fatherly to me than my dad ever was — he crammed the void. He had such entry to my coronary coronary heart on account of his establish. My dad not at all wrote me utterly happy birthday, nevertheless [on Facebook], I’d get ‘Bob Laymon says “Happy birthday!” My dad not at all obtained right here to my screenings, nevertheless I’d get an award, and it’s: ‘Bob Laymon says, “Answer to go, kiddo!”‘”
Laymon not at all met the particular person she calls Fb Bob in precise life, nevertheless imagining what it could look like if she had helped her to jot down “Bob Trevino Likes It,” a film starring Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo that’s competing in SXSW‘s 2024 narrative attribute rivals. All by the tactic, Laymon found strategies to flooring even the fictionalized plot components truly — that’s the place the third Bob is offered in.
“I wished to change the establish, because of I was anxious that my dad would sue me. There had been this gentleman in Austin, Bob Trevino, and he and his partner had always been so kind to me from my very first film set. So I said, ‘Can I exploit your establish? Because of you’ve gotten such coronary coronary heart, after which I can combine these and it’ll actually really feel precise to me after I’m writing it.’”
Barely than a standard rehearsal course of, Ferreira focused on attending to know Laymon whereas on the brink of play Lily, the character Laymon wrote based on herself. “We’d go to a diner, get meals and talk about family trauma,” Ferreira says. “It felt just like the one time I’ve ever seen this particular family dynamic that’s so close to points I’ve expert. We had per week in Kentucky doing prep and exercises, and the whole thing was creating in a signifies that I’ve not at all had sooner than as an actor. It was so merely accessible to me, my emotions.”
Casting Leguizamo as Fb Bob was equally emotional for Laymon.
“I was an enormous fan of John’s work already, nevertheless I checked out a great deal of interviews of him and I observed one notably related to bullying. I believed, ‘This specific particular person will get it.’ This on-line interaction [with Bob Laymon] might need gone totally in any other case — there’s lots bullying on-line — and there’s lots power in merely doing one factor completely completely different, saying one factor kind.”
“I observed that interview and I started crying. Then I flew to New York and met with him. By the third or fourth time, he said, ‘Oh yeah, bro,’ and hit me on the shoulder. I was like, ‘I really feel we’re doing this movie.’”
Inside the film, Lily works as an aide to a youthful disabled woman named Daphne (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), who notices the people-pleasing tendencies Lily picked up from her dysfunctional relationship alongside along with her father. Nonetheless when Daphne takes Lily to a rage room, the place she’s given a baseball bat to smash and destroy points with a view to vent her frustrations, Lily can’t switch.
“My dad’s anger was very scary, and it harm a lot of folks, so I spotted early to solely suppress it,” Laymon says. “As soon as I acquired to varsity, I had suppressed my emotions for thus prolonged, people would say, ‘Are you hungry?’ And I’d be like, ‘I don’t know. How do I inform if I’m hungry?’ I had not felt my feelings. No person had requested me how I actually really feel. As soon as I used to be looking at Lily, and what the hero should experience to permit them to become who they should be, one was that she desires to particular her anger.”
That expression occurred on a second journey to the development room.
“It’s the suppression of any emotion that may very well be not-as-okay for everyone around her,” Ferreira says. “So that you simply see the excellence throughout the two circumstances throughout the rage room, which was very satisfying because of I acquired to get my rage out.”
When Lily’s father (carried out by French Stewart) cuts her out of his life for accidentally revealing to his girlfriend that he’s been courting spherical, she finds the “completely different” Bob Trevino on-line and the pair become fast mates. Bob firsts helps Lily in smaller strategies — repairing a broken toilet that Lily is conscious of her private father would not at all help her with — then by listening to traumatic tales from her childhood and making an attempt to help her relive them further positively.
In distinction to Bob Laymon, part of Bob Trevino’s drive to level out up for Lily comes from the ache of his family story: Years prior to now, he and his partner, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), misplaced their son to a unusual sickness. Jeanie learns to handle by making elaborate scrapbooks, a apply that strikes Lily to tears — partially because of her father had carried out the choice, slicing her out of outdated family photos.
“My good good friend’s mom was a scrapbooker,” Laymon says. “She was a information on the film; Rachel Bay Jones and I Zoomed alongside along with her. I was merely fascinated. When my dad was mad at me, he gave all my childhood photos to my sister in a garbage bag. So I merely kind of combined that: Proper right here’s my good good friend’s mom, who takes every {photograph} of her family and adorns it as a treasure to keep up for generations, the place my dad put them in a bag, wrinkled.”
She moreover borrowed from one in every of her friendships to accentuate Bob and Jeanie’s grief.
“My good good friend and his partner had misplaced their baby, and I volunteer for an organization they started for his state of affairs. So I believed, ‘I’m going to ask them if I can use footage of him.’ Much like the Bob Trevino establish, the whole thing on this movie desires to come back again from one factor precise. John and Rachel truly revered that. There was an vitality throughout the room the place you felt that it wasn’t solely a picture; that was a person.”
Ferreira moreover launched in her private childhood photos for a pivotal scene near the highest of the movie, all through which she says her “physique was overcome with emotion. It shattered me.”
“Most likely probably the most treasured childhood photos on this planet,” Laymon says. “How would possibly anybody take care of this infant with one thing nevertheless absolute love?”
Spoiler alert: As always, therapeutic from trauma and dysfunction is an unending course of, and Lily’s onerous events don’t end by the purpose the movie does. Nonetheless Laymon and Ferreira hope the story they suggested comes all through as hopeful.
“I like to consider Lily as a result of the inside infant. There’s naiveness, like a toddler who follows their father or mom spherical and to make sure that they’re okay. Although there’s no closure on the end, getting greater incrementally and acknowledging that what occurred to you was tousled is such a [big deal]. I always made constructive my inside infant was out first.”
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