Sparkella Makes a Plan, out today, is the follow-up to last year’sThe One and Only Sparkella.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What inspired you to writeSparkella Makes a Plan?
And then this just sort of fell in my lap.
Mike Marsland/WireImage; Feiwel & Friends
With the first book, I just told a story about my daughter.
It was kind of a gorgeous experience and I had so many people helping me.
I thought, what’s the next logical step for Spark in her learning process?
What was your writing process?
How did your daughter contribute to it?
But I realized very quickly that Evie had already planned it, she’s a full-on designer and artist.
She already had her plan.
When you sort of failed on your plan, what now?
What do you hope parents and kids will get out of readingSparkella Makes a Plan?
It connects you to her.
And I’m sure if it’s a boy, it’s the same way.
I think that is the moral on the surface of what Sparkella and her dad are experiencing.
I was such a boy, a very Southern boy growing up.
I could’ve never known that I was going to be a girl dad.
She’s pushed me past any limits that I thought I had.
Evie demands 100 percent of my creative, emotional attention at all times.
That is something that I can say that I haven’t experienced anywhere else in my life.
The One and Only Sparkellais being turned into a live-action movie.
What can you tell us about that?
Movies have 15,000 lives before they actually get made.
And then when they get made, they also have another 15,000 lives.
I’m obviously making it because I want to be in it.
But we’ll see.
I love movies, movies were my first love.
I think that movies were probably my first books, I wasn’t a great reader.
So I watched movies in a way to learn about the world.
Is Salma Hayek the Richard Gere to your Julia Roberts?
I don’t think it works exactly as clean as that.
I wish it did, because that’s a structure that really is incredibly beautiful.
I didn’t know where to take Mike.
Our first two movies were movies about guys [and] were made for a predominantly female audience.
Now I want to make a movie about a female’s experience.
But I didn’t know what that was.
And to see him in a way that he’s never been seen.
Also for him to see her like she’s never been seen.
I want to do the Super Bowl of stripper movies.
I don’t want to stick to the world of reality anymore.
Speaking of amazing, your epic 2016 lip-sync battle with Beyonce is a fan favorite.
Have you ever reunited again in person?
You know what’s crazy?
I have never met her other than on stage in that moment.
I’ve talked to her over text but I never met her in person.
She actually didn’t think she was going to be able to make it to the battle.
Full disclosure, I just didn’t even think that she would say yes.
I knew that that Jenna [Dewan] was going to do something with Paula Abul.
And I was like, I don’t know what to do if she’s going to do that.
But I was like, I wouldn’t really want someone to do that to my cutout.
And then she said “oh I might be able to make it.”
That was not what I was expecting.
And she somehow made space in her giant life to show up and do this thing.
I don’t even know how or why it happened other than it did.
