It's just days away until 2023’s summer blockbuster, The Little Mermaid, hits cinemas (anyone else got Friday night cinema plans laid out already?) and there’s no one likely to be feeling the pressure than its star, Halle Bailey, who plays Ariel in the re-imagined classic.
In an exclusive interview with GLAMOUR US, the actor spoke candidly about how she got the news about the role, the long audition process and how excited she is for fans to see her play a black Disney princess on the big screen.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Bailey says of the film’s release. “I auditioned for the film when I was 18, and I turned 23 this year.” The actor says it all began in 2019 and her agent got in touch to say that director Rob Marshall wanted her to audition for his adaptation of the 1989 animated classic. Bailey tells journalist Leah Faye Cooper that she assumed it would be for “one of the sisters or something like that” but later learned Marshall had seen her perform at the Grammys and was interested in her playing the lead.
“I was almost just paralysed with fear,” she told Cooper, revealing her sister Chlöe helped her prepare her audition tape which included two scenes and a performance of “Part of Your World.”
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After a trip to New York to meet Marshall and producer John DeLuca, Bailey said “I didn’t hear anything for a while—a few months actually.” She added: “I was like, ‘Okay, well, I guess I didn’t get it.’ I forgot about it completely” until she finally got the call. “I freaked out, I was screaming…I was like, is this real life?” Bailey added, “I was catapulted into this new world.”
Bailey spoke of self-doubt over the role but Chlöe said: “You must, you have to, and you have to fly. This is your moment.” The star also opened about watching the original film when she was five, “I remember Ariel being the reason I wanted to swim.” She said: “When I saw her [I was] like, ‘She’s so beautiful; I want to be a mermaid too.’ She didn’t look like me, but I was okay with that because it was what I was used to at the time.”
When the press images were revealed of Bailey as Ariel, the actor spoke of her pride. “When I saw those for the first time, I just cried…I was sobbing uncontrollably. The fact that these babies are looking at me and feeling the emotions that they’re feeling is a really humbling, beautiful thing.” She compares the feeling when Anika Noni Rose played The Princess and the Frog in 2009. “ I know how much of that movie changed my whole perspective on life,” she says. “Wow, this is possible. Black princesses are possible. We deserve to take up these spaces too."
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The actor also spoke about how her own hair was incorporated into Ariel’s identity. “[Ariel still] has red hair, because that’s a very iconic part of her, but I really did admire the fact that because I’m a Black woman and I have locs, [the producers] wanted to incorporate that into Ariel’s look,” Bailey says. “My locs are so important to me. I've had them since I was five. I always think about what life would be like if I combed out my locs, but I've never had my straight hair at all.”
On her big screen debut, Bailey said: “I've never seen myself on a big screen, so when I see myself there, I'm just like, "Is that me? Did I really do that?"
The Little Mermaid is released in UK cinemas on 26 May 2023.
Read the full interview on GLAMOUR US.
