“It’s very easy to be incredibly hostile and very loud but it’s the minority and we need to remember that. The majority of people have sense and have a kinder heart.”
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Marshall said Bailey was the first girl to be auditioned for the role, singing Ariel’s classic Part Of Your World so movingly that he was in tears.
“I remember thinking ‘have we found Ariel, the first person walking through the door?’,” he said. “I didn’t trust it, I didn’t believe it right away, so we saw hundreds of girls after that.
“But she kept coming back in and, honestly, she’d set the bar so high that no-one ever surpassed it.”
Marshall, best known for Chicago, Memoirs Of A Geisha and Mary Poppins Returns, was surprised by the #NotMyAriel backlash.
“I thought ‘this is so archaic’,” he said. “Are we really discussing the colour of someone’s skin at this point?
Star Halle Bailey and director Rob Marshall at the Australian premiere of The Little Mermaid at Sydney’s State Theatre on Monday night.Credit: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
“But when I started the whole process, there was no agenda to cast a woman of colour. We were just looking for the best Ariel.”
While The Little Mermaid was a hit in 1989, starting a Disney animation renaissance that included Aladdin, The Lion King and Beauty and The Beast, it was also problematic for centring on a 16-year-old mermaid who gave up her voice, family and undersea life when she fell for a human prince, Eric.
Marshall said they wanted to make Ariel and Eric’s characters more contemporary.
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“I wanted to make it clear that she wasn’t falling in love with a guy because he was cute,” he said. “That seems so superficial. So we worked hard to make the character of Eric someone who’s literally a kindred spirit, someone who’s very much like her …
“She does something impulsive, as most teenagers do, because she wants something so badly. But she does it from a real place of truth, wanting to be part of something, not just falling in love with a guy.”
The new version has more diverse supporting characters than the animation, including Javier Bardem as King Triton and seven daughters who represent the seven seas. It also has new songs for Ariel, Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) and a snappy hip-hop number co-written by Lin Manuel Miranda for Scuttle (Awkwafina).
