The woman who mistook a stranger for her dad, and made a film about it

Tracie Laymon can’t recall exactly when her father stopped talking to her – “it was not a one-off; one time was like a year and a half, another might have been a month” – but when she found his name on Facebook one night she took a punt. She added him as a friend.

Much to her surprise, he friended her back.

“So I woke up to that notification, and my first thought was, ‘All right, my dad likes something of mine. We’re back. We’re gonna be OK.’ ”

It wasn’t her father. It was a stranger in Wichita, Kansas – a long way from her home in Austin, Texas – who happened to have the same name.

She immediately realised it was a case of mistaken identity, but it didn’t really matter.

Writer-director Tracie Laymon based the story on her own experience with a man who shared the same name as her estranged father.Credit: Getty Images

“I don’t know if I got a dopamine hit or some tiny baby step of healing with that initial like, but it felt good,” says Laymon. “And when you need things so desperately, sometimes they come, healing comes in strange ways, so I decided I’m just going to stay friends with him, because it actually feels nice to be accepted by someone with my dad’s name.”

That first like sparked a correspondence that would run for nine years, and ultimately inspired a gorgeous low-key movie, Bob Trevino Likes It, that has been wowing critics and winning audiences since its debut at SXSW last year. After a successful run at film festivals around the world, where it has won multiple audience prizes, the movie has just opened in cinemas in Australia and the US.

Movies about strangers meeting online generally end up as cautionary tales about catfishing and, Laymon concedes, “this could have gone in a completely different direction”.

John Leguizamo plays Bob Trevino, the stranger.Credit: Rialto

In the movie, lonely Lily (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira) befriends stranger Bob (John Leguizamo), and the pair meet offline (real father Bob is played by French Stewart, from 3rd Rock From the Sun).

Tracie and Bob never met. But in the nine years they were friends before he died, Facebook Bob became a supportive and nurturing surrogate father figure, providing acceptance and approval Laymon never got from her actual dad.

“We would have conversations about hamburgers or pets, the most innocent conversations you could have,” she says. “Like clockwork, I would get ‘Bob Laymon says Happy Birthday’, every single year. And not one of those years did my dad say happy birthday to me.

“I’d win an award in a short film festival, and I’d get a notification, ‘Bob Laymon says way to go, kiddo’. And my dad never came to any of my screenings, never even really talked to me about my filmmaking.”

Tracie never told Bob Laymon 2.0 how much his kindness meant to her. “He had no idea all those years how he was helping me heal,” she says. “I basically made this movie because I was consumed with regret for not telling him, and I had to find a way to share that.”

In a way, though, the fact he never got any thanks is its own validation. “It’s just proof that you have to continue to be kind, even if you never see the results, because you have no idea what the butterfly effect of it is,” she says.

“You and I would not be talking unless a stranger had been kind to me on the internet, and this movie would not be affecting all the people it’s affecting if a stranger had not been kind to me on the internet. I just felt like that was so mind-blowing and beautiful and a lesson that I had to share, and also a way to honour him, since I never told him.”

As a low-budget heartwarming comedy tinged with sadness and pain, Bob Trevino Likes It is unlikely to shatter box-office records. But it is likely to spread by word of mouth from those who see it, and come away feeling a little better about humanity.

Why are people responding as they are?

“I think we are really lonely right now, and the internet and social media has become this dumping ground for hatred and people telling us we don’t belong,” says Laymon.

Her movie is “the opposite of all that”, though it’s not at all “toxically positive. It’s light-filled, but it’s not unaware of the darkness. If it acted like everything was great, nothing was bad in the whole world, then people would have their guard up.”

The biggest factor of all? “It is a real-world experience,” she says. “The fact it’s inspired by a true story, I think, gives people a little hope.”

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