Tony Hale’s latest film examines the life of a father and has its world premiere just weeks after he drops his real-life daughter off at college.
While speaking with PEOPLE on Monday, August 26, about his new film Sketch ahead of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, Hale, 53, tells PEOPLE he “just dropped off” his daughter Loy Ann, 18, at college for the first time when asked how he relates his own experiences as a parent to playing one on screen.
“So I’m in that kind of vulnerable space,” he admits. “But that’s what it’s all about – you just want to protect them all the time. You know?”
Sketch stars Hale as a grieving father named Taylor who is thrown into supernatural chaos when his young children, grieving the recent death of their mother, accidentally find a magical lake that brings a series of his daughter’s grief-fueled drawings to life as various dangerous monsters. In the film, Hale’s character is seen at first suspicious of his children when they try to explain what’s going on, only to realize he’s wrong when their school bus doesn’t return home one day.
“I mean, my daughter is 18 and, you know, you’re always trying not to live in ‘what if?’ ” says Hale. “You’re constantly trying to stay present and love them and not create stories and scenarios that are, you know, crazy that could happen to them.”
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Loy Ann and Tony Hale 2022.
Courtesy of Tony Hale
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“And so when it is evident that something [happened] and you go to the school bus and they’re not there and something happens, it’s just panic, you know? And so it’s almost like we’re living what every parent fears.”
“I mean, good God, I lived in so many stories in my head as a parent that never happened, but man, it feels like they are happening or could happen,” he adds.
Hale has a daughter, Loy Ann, with wife Martel Thompson, whom he has been married to since 2003. While discussing his favorite moments in the new film, the Emmy-winning actor reconnected his own experience of fatherhood with a key point in the film where his character apologizes for your mistakes to your children.
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Bianca Belle and Tony Hale in Sketch (2024).
Morgan Stacey
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“I think as a parent, when I say to my daughter, ‘I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, it was a mistake,'” he says. “I think the power and recognition of a parent’s mistake is really, really beautiful.”
Sketch has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7.
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Source: HIS Education