Making a splash: A deep dive into the live-action Little Mermaid with a new generation's Ariel
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Perhaps Halle Bailey was always destined to be a Disney princess. The studio's groundbreaking new Ariel has the "voice of an angel," according to director Rob Marshall. "She just floats through the world with tremendous grace and kindness," adds her costar Melissa McCarthy. And, as her new onscreen love interest Jonah Hauer-King puts it, "She's just a joy to be around."
But it's not only those who worked with Bailey on the upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid who feel that way. The 23-year-old Atlanta native seems to have an effect on everyone around her, even while strolling through the Most Magical Place on Earth one recent March afternoon. She was in Disney World to visit the Disney Dreamers Academy, a program that seeks to create opportunities for Black teens from underrepresented communities. The program's latest celebrity ambassador — also one half of Beyoncé-blessed R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle — was walking the parks with her friends and family when Mila Rose, a bespectacled little girl in a flowery orange dress, ran up and wrapped her arms around her. So enchanted she was by Bailey, dressed simply in blue jeans and a white tank top, that she couldn't seem to break her embrace. "She just hugged me so, so tight and it honestly filled me up and made me feel good that I'm making her proud," the former Grown-ish actress recounts a day later. "I was really trying not to get so emotionally overwhelmed by it."
Video of this exchange has since gone viral on social media, speaking to the heart of Bailey's new incarnation of The Little Mermaid: On May 26, Black girls all over the world — just like Mila Rose — will get to see an Ariel who looks like them. "Little things like that, even though they seem really small, can make your whole day," Bailey says of the viral moment. "It makes it feel like all of this hard work, all of this sacrifice that I put into this film, is really paying off."
A tail as old as time
The Little Mermaid is just the latest animated Disney classic to be reimagined. "We have a number of irons in the fire at any given time," Sean Bailey, president of Disney Live Action, explains of the studio's upcoming slate of adaptations, which includes Snow White, Hercules, Mufasa, and now Moana. "They move forward when the right mix of ingredients comes together." The executive says one of those ingredients was Marshall, who started his Hollywood directing career with The Wonderful World of Disney version of Annie on ABC in 1999.
The filmmaker fell in love with The Little Mermaid after catching it in a movie theater with his long-time producing (and life) partner John DeLuca in 1989, and credits it with sparking "the resurgence of musicals on film." So when Disney approached the couple — also responsible for the studio's 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns — about crafting a new version of the story, they dove in head first.
"It's a very emotional story," Marshall says from his Long Island, N.Y., home in late March, one week away from finishing the film in its entirety. "We were able to take the beauty of what's there in the original film and the Hans Christian Andersen tale and really bring more depth."
Andersen felt like an "ungainly child all his life," DeLuca says of the author, who first published his mermaid story in 1837. "Even as he grew older, he never felt he fit in." As an adult, the author became attracted to another man — who didn't return his affections and eventually married a woman. In Ariel-speak, the producer says, "He was never going to be part of the world." Marshall feels all of Andersen's fairy tales are essentially about outsiders, including the story that would inspire The Little Mermaid. "Even though it was written in the 1800s, it seems very modern, about this girl who wants something more, feels displaced, doesn't feel like everyone around her," explains the director. "Through courage and her own convictions and her own passions, she gives up so much to be where she really feels she belongs."
In Marshall's new film, that restlessness stems from more than just longing for life beyond King Triton's (Javier Bardem) underwater domain. With her red locs and darker skin, Halle Bailey's Ariel doesn't look like most of her multicultural family. "Rob's vision was to really give a deeper dive into Ariel's heart, into her brain, and allow us to see more of that gumption and passion and freedom, and reason for the things she was doing. Like in the grotto," Bailey says, referring to that classic scene where Ariel pours over her "gadgets and gizmos aplenty." "You see a bit more of her curiosity."
Can you feel the love tonight?
The first time Hauer-King met Bailey wasn't like Prince Eric and Ariel's oceanside meet-cute, but it had its own kind of magic: The Cambridge-educated Brit, who previously played Laurie in PBS' 2017 Little Women miniseries, initially met eyes with his future princess during his final Little Mermaid screen test. It was the culmination of a process that began with hundreds of hopefuls eyeing the male lead — including Harry Styles. Marshall confirms he spoke with the "As It Was" superstar about playing Eric once upon a time, but the future Don't Worry Darling and My Policeman headliner "really felt like he wanted to go off and do the movies that he ended up doing, which were sort of darker." Instead, the director landed on Hauer-King, who came with a "sweetness" and "deep passion."
Disney established an entire set in London for the final audition round, complete with trailers for the actors, call sheets, costume fittings, and Marshall's Oscar-winning Memoirs of a Geisha cinematographer Dion Beebe behind the camera. Hauer-King remembers Bailey's warmth, but three other guys were also vying for the Eric part. "I didn't take her being kind to me as any indication," the 27-year-old recalls. "I just assumed she was a lovely person and would've done that for anyone."
Minutes after returning to his trailer from the audition, he heard a knock at his door. It was Bailey coming to wish him luck and share her hopes of seeing him again. Hauer-King says he was "traumatized" by his own flight of ideas that erupted from that exchange: "I thought, 'What does it all mean? Is that an indication? Did she knock on everyone's door?'" Bailey, as it turned out, did not. It really was a sign. "We became very, very close friends — and still are," he now says.
Eric feels a kindred soul within Ariel, and his life on land is a mirror of her own under the sea. Like the mermaid, the prince has a single parent of a different ethnicity: Queen Selina, a new character added to this version, played by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child's Noma Dumezweni. "It's a lovely balance," Dumezweni remarks. "It's the sense of these babies being two outsiders of their origin story."
Eric also shares Ariel's thirst for adventure, which hasn't been quenched inside the walls of his island castle. In a new ballad, "Wild Uncharted Waters," Hauer-King sings of Eric's struggle to find himself amid the familial pressures of becoming the kingdom's future ruler. "He wants to see the other edge of that horizon line, wherever it may lead," says the song's lyricist, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who worked with 1989 Little Mermaid composer Alan Menken on a total of three new songs for the live-action movie, including Ariel's "For the First Time" and "Scuttlebutt" for the seagull Scuttle and crab Sebastian, voiced by Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs. (Menken's original Little Mermaid collaborator, Disney legend Howard Ashman, sadly died in 1991 during the making of Beauty and the Beast.) "Eric is endlessly drawn to the sea and Ariel's endlessly drawn to land," Miranda continues. "So where does that get us?"
Disney Melissa McCarthy took inspiration from drag queens for her portrayal of Ursula
The scare necessities
Ariel's story clearly hits different notes 34 years after Jodi Benson gave voice to the mermaid on screen, but Bailey stresses "all the beautiful elements that struck us when we were younger are still there" in this blend of live-action and CG, including familiar characters Scuttle, Sebastian, and the fish Flounder (Jacob Tremblay). And, of course, there's one other crucial element: a certain unfortunate soul.
Melissa McCarthy, 52, used to watch The Little Mermaid endlessly with the kids she once nannied in her 20s in New York prior to becoming an actor. Decades later, the Bridesmaids and Nine Perfect Strangers star found herself exploring other facets to her favorite Disney villain, the half-squid Ursula. Menken confirms a fun fact about the animated character: The drag queen Divine (who McCarthy happened to emulate for a 2011 EW cover story photo shoot) was the inspiration behind the sea witch. In assuming the role, McCarthy says she "100 percent" used drag as an influence. "There's a drag queen that lives in me. I'm always right on the verge of going full-time with her," she says, having started her career performing as the drag persona Miss Y in Manhattan clubs.
The new film refreshes Ursula's origin story to make the tentacled sorceress the estranged sister of King Triton, a familial twist first introduced in the 2008 Broadway musical version of the animated movie. DeLuca calls Ursula the "black sheep" of the family, noting the pain that comes with it. "She's the villain, but there's such an edge to her," McCarthy adds. "She's been put in this lair. It's like she's had too many martinis alone. Her friends are eels. That is a woman who has seen it, been in it, dug her way back out. All my references are terrible, but I kept thinking, 'Many a Pall Mall has this woman had.'"
Having been through isolation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mistress of comedy jokes she never wants to go that Method for a role ever again: "To keep the humor and the sadness and the edginess to Ursula is everything I want in a character — and frankly, everything I want in a drag queen."
"Everyone's seen the trailer, and now you know how good Halle's gonna be, 'cause she sounds incredible," Miranda says of the recording artist's rendition of "Part of Your World." "But no one's ready for Melissa McCarthy." The actress, who admits singing once petrified her, performed Ursula's signature number, "Poor Unfortunate Souls," (now made more famous by a cover by Titus Burgess, a.k.a. Broadway's first Sebastian) with an orchestra in London for the cast recording. "She brings all of the delicious camp from the original, but then also is just scary," Miranda adds. "If that's your favorite song, you're going to be happy."
Giles Keyte/Disney 'The Little Mermaid' director Rob Marshall on location
A whole new world
Though he was Oscar-nominated for directing the 2002 adaptation of Chicago, Marshall doesn't believe he was ready to make The Little Mermaid until now. He and DeLuca previously dealt with mermaids in 2011's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and featured an underwater bubble bath sequence in Mary Poppins Returns. With The Little Mermaid, however, there are multiple numbers, like "Under the Sea," set… well, under the sea. "It was quite daunting to think, 'How are we gonna create an underwater musical?'" he admits. (DeLuca says it was more like "150 percent daunting.") "We know the Esther Williams underwater musicals where they're holding their breath. This is a whole different thing," Marshall continues. "The whole idea of how we're gonna do this was so complicated."
DeLuca says they spent about two months in Los Angeles with screenwriter David Magee developing an outline that broke down their plan of attack. This was followed by an elaborate previsualization phase, during which all the underwater scenes — and some above-water scenes — were meticulously choreographed and staged to determine exactly how they would move the actors about without gravity. "It's almost like we created a movie before we filmed the movie," Marshall remarks. When the actors finally got to set in London, just before the pandemic hit in 2020, they had weeks of rehearsals to execute their plan.
Bailey remembers spending most of filming in a tuning fork, a mechanism that locks an actor into a harness that then can spin and rotate to emulate swimming. (Disney used this on Angelina Jolie for flying sequences in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.) Other times she was on wires or a combination of both. "It was an intense routine of having to be in the gym by like 4 a.m., working out before you go to stunts, and then you're on the harness and in that world in the air for hours at a time and your core is burning all day, and your legs and your arms," Bailey says. But it was worth it. "I loved being able to feel like I could fly."
"It was like [being] at Disney Parks in the rides," Bardem exclaims. "You have to be in shape because those arms have to be there. And most importantly, you have to have a strong core. You really have to do some gymnastics." That said, he was relieved to know he wouldn't be as shirtless as Triton is in the animated movie. "I'm not Dwayne Johnson. I'm not Brad Pitt," the actor, who instead donned armor as the underwater king, says with a booming laugh.
The physical demands were also an adjustment for McCarthy. "Rob wanted me to experience the tentacles and the space I really took up," she says. "So I had eight dancers around me, each one puppeteering a 10- or 12-foot tentacle. I would swoop to the left and all of these dancers would come with me. Then if I'd reach out for something, one of my tentacles really would go out and bring something back."
In lieu of facial capture, which would mean planting those green dots all over the actors' faces to record their expressions, Marshall turned to the Anyma, which he cheekily admits is an unfortunate name "because it sounds too close to something else." The technology is a system used to help make Josh Brolin's Thanos in Avengers: Endgame and Will Smith's Genie in Guy Ritchie's 2019 live-action Aladdin. As Marshall explains, the Anyma allowed the production to "film a portion of an actor and then technology would take over. We could capture their faces with lots of camera light if we needed to do something that was just too complicated technically to make work moving through the water."
Bailey did get to shoot in actual water, however. Maybe not 13 hours a day, as she was previously quoted as saying ("I'm like, 'Did I really say 13 hours?'"), but the cast shot portions of The Little Mermaid on location in Italy, including pieces on the beach after Ariel saves Eric from drowning. The water is where Bailey found her confidence to be the lead of a large-scale Hollywood movie. "There's something so healing and peaceful about being near the ocean, and something spiritual about it too," says the actress, who has considered the ocean to be her happy place since she was little. "I just felt like I was getting purified, you know?"
Giles Keyte/Disney Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric and Halle Bailey as Ariel in 'The Little Mermaid'
Reflection
Returning to life on land since filming ended has presented its own challenges for Bailey. When the first footage of her as the new Ariel arrived at D23 last September, it sparked a whole new wave of feedback, some as heartfelt as Black families sharing videos of their children's joyous reactions to the trailer, and some as toxic as racist remarks made online. Bailey acknowledges "there have been a lot of different opinions and comments" about the movie so far, and she's made her mental health a priority because of it.
"I just have to block out the noise," she says. "I don't really see a lot of the comments. I choose to not read them, or delete Twitter, things like that, and just accept this moment for what it is, which is a big, beautiful blessing and opportunity for me."
Bailey continues to focus on the good, which includes moments like meeting Mila Rose and seeing the impact she's having on others in person, not just through the lens of the internet. "That's what keeps me going and my head on straight and focused," Bailey says of her interaction with the young fan. "At the end of the day, that moment right there just confirmed that's everything this movie is supposed to be."
She adds, "The good outweighs all the bad."
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