Meet Harry Potter and the Cursed Child star who plays Prince Eric's mother in The Little Mermaid
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Among the distinct changes made to Disney's live-action retelling of The Little Mermaid is the story of Prince Eric, played by Jonah Hauer-King (PBS' Little Women, BBC One's World on Fire). "The role of Eric in the animated film — I'm sure the original creators would agree to this — it's not fully fleshed out," director Rob Marshall has told EW. "It's sort of a wooden, classic prince character with not a lot going on."
One of the ways Marshall, producer John DeLuca, and screenwriter David Magee chose to address this was by introducing a new character to the tale: Eric's mother. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and The Undoing star Noma Dumezweni makes her debut as Queen Selina in EW's exclusive first-look photo.
Both Ariel (Halle Bailey) and Eric come from single-parent multicultural households. (Javier Bardem, who plays King Triton, told Marshall when offered the role, "If the father is allowed to speak with a Latin accent, I'm here!") Dumezweni feels that dynamic creates a "lovely balance" for the characters.
Giles Keyte/Disney Noma Dumezweni as Queen Selina in 'The Little Mermaid'
"It's this sense of these babies being two outsiders of their origin story and then finding each other," she explains in EW's Little Mermaid cover story. "That's how I understood it and how Rob described it. So Eric being mothered and grown by a woman who looks like me on an island and you hear that story, and then you look at Ariel and her family and she being the outsider of that — there's that sense of, 'We recognize each other when we know what each other's been through.'"
"We all know [Eric] as this charming, romantic, charismatic guy in the cartoon, but we wanted to go deeper," Hauer-King elaborates. "I really understood him as this very adventurous but quite restless spirit who didn't feel fully at home in his own home, and felt quite trapped and restricted behind the four walls of the castle, and was really about looking outwards rather than inwards. What was really special about it was that not only applied to him, but it really informed his relationship with Ariel."
Dumezweni previously worked with Marshall and DeLuca on Mary Poppins Returns, playing bank secretary Penny Farthing in the 2018 film. The two-time Laurence Olivier Award winner and one-time Tony nominee says that was her first big movie — when she was given the chance to reunite with the filmmaking team on The Little Mermaid, she was aghast.
"I could sense this was big," she says. "My observation of what they've created and the tiny bit that I have observed is a thing of absolute beauty."
Giles Keyte/Disney Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric in 'The Little Mermaid'
Dumezweni filmed most of her scenes with her on-screen son on the Italian island of Sardinia. Even now, she still considers Hauer-King to be one of her "theater babies," young actors she's become close with over the years through various theater and screen projects. "I did text him when the [Little Mermaid] trailer came, going, 'Are you ready? You'd better be ready, 'cause this is f---ing huge,'" she recalls.
Dumezweni still can't get over the scope of The Little Mermaid, which makes her appreciate all the twists and turns her career has taken. She credits the Harry Potter stage play and HBO limited series The Undoing as having tremendous impacts on her trajectory as an actor.
"I'm gonna be 54 this year," she says with pride. "People keep telling me not to say my age, but, no, I just need to let people know that whatever you think is supposed to be the thing is not necessarily the thing. Don't stop your imagination and limitation. Just keep open."
Read more about The Little Mermaid in EW's cover story. The film opens in theaters on May 26.
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