The Director Rob Marshall on Halle Bailey as “The Little Mermaid”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The live-action remake of Disney’s classic “The Little Mermaid” is out this weekend. The performance of Halle Bailey as Princess Ariel has been widely praised, but some on the right lambasted the casting of a Black actress in the role as an example of—of course—wokeness on the part of Disney. The film’s director, Rob Marshall, dismisses the notion as quickly as he can. “It was never: ‘Let’s do a woke version of ‘Little Mermaid,’ ” he tells Naomi Fry. “It was: ‘Let’s just do the best version.’ ” Marshall took an unusual path toward directing: he began his career as a dancer on Broadway, moving to film only after becoming injured while performing in “Cats.” Since then, he has directed “Chicago,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and “Mary Poppins Returns.” For “The Little Mermaid,” he drew inspiration from the original Hans Christian Andersen text, which he says is a coming-of-age story about a young girl who breaks down barriers to understand herself and the world around her. “I just felt, wow, isn’t that the world we live in?,” he says. “I mean for me, the whole time I was doing this movie, it felt really like an antidote to the times we’re living in, the divisive world we live in.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNWC Studios and the New Yorker.
0:12.1	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:16.0	The Little Mermaid, a remake of the animated classic that's now using live actors, opens
0:21.3	this weekend.
0:22.3	A remake like this is not without all kinds of risks.
0:26.0	The underwater musical sequences have to convince us that they're real.
0:30.8	Generations of fans grew up on the 1989 original and they'll hold it to some very high standards.
0:36.9	And ever since the singer and actress, Halle Bailey, was announced as the new aerial,
0:42.4	there's been a racist backlash from a small but loud chorus on social media and it feels
0:49.0	all too familiar.
0:50.9	While it's got a lot of fans, it is also being attacked by some internet trolls.
0:55.7	The actress, Halle Bailey, stars as aerial in Disney's new live action film and she looks
1:01.1	at nothing like the animated Little Mermaid with red hair from the original 1989 classic.
1:07.7	Then there are the ugly racist tweets.
1:10.3	The Little Mermaid is white, not black.
1:15.4	No Me Fry covers pop culture for the New Yorker and she talked about the Little Mermaid
1:19.7	the other day with its director, Rob Marshall.
1:24.0	And Marshall is not your typical blockbuster director.
1:26.6	He began his career as a dancer on Broadway, but he was injured while performing in cats.
1:32.6	So he eventually turned to filmmaking.
1:34.9	Since then, Marshall has directed Chicago, which 20 years ago won the Oscar for Best Picture
1:40.4	and he's made ambitious musical films like Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns.
	...

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