Robbie (Elizabeth Banks)
Robbie is based on Patricia Roche, who was Ty Warner’s girlfriend and business partner “of sorts” as the company began to take off. She then moved to the UK to run Ty’s distribution in the country, and made a lot of money doing it! She and Warner were alleged to have continued seeing each other romantically for many years after breaking up.
Sheila Warner (Sarah Snook)
Sarah Snook’s character Sheila is modeled after lighting designer Faith McGowan. McGowan was in a long-term relationship with Ty Warner from 1993 onwards, and she was still with him and present at the large Ty Inc. holiday party where Warner announced record profits, a recreation of which can be seen in The Beanie Bubble film. Ty also showed Faith and her daughters the first prototype for Legs the Frog, and she became closely involved in the company’s operations.
But they never married, and McGowan wasn’t happy about Warner’s ongoing relationship with former girlfriend and business partner Patricia Roche, who had become rich running Ty’s interests over in the UK. McGowan worried that she would be left in entirely the opposite situation if her relationship with Warner imploded. “If Ty changed the locks on the Oak Brook house while the girls were at school or I was at work, I had nothing,” McGowan recalled. “No house. No money in the bank. No employee severance. Not even a credit card.”
She began selling highly sought-after Ty collectibles to establish a financial safety net, but after McGowan and Warner broke up, Warner went on to have another long-term relationship with a woman called Kathryn Zimmie. In 2021, Zimmie filed a lawsuit against Warner that accused him of years of abuse.
Ty Warner (Zack Galifianakis)
Ty Warner was born in 1944 to a toy salesman father and a pianist mother who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would apparently attempt to initiate relationships with his father’s girlfriends after his parents divorced, and was reportedly fired from the company his father worked at for trying to sell his own products to their customers.
When his father died, he poured his life savings and inheritance into founding Ty Inc., which was a huge success thanks to its posable, under-stuffed toys and of course the big launch of the Beanie Babies range, along with the bubble of artificial scarcity he created around their production and availability. His fastidiousness about the look and presentation of his stuffed toys soon extended to his own appearance, and Warner embarked on “a twenty-year odyssey of plastic surgery”.
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue8yoraKdXa%2B8r7GOrbBmr5Gnu6a%2BjJqlnWWknbJuvsSao2aolaS9rbGMm5yhoZ6ZerW0xGaZnpmenrJurtSbmaWdXajBsL7YaA%3D%3D