Halle Bailey on reinventing the Disney princess in The Little Mermaid

By Jen Wang

When Halle Bailey received the call to audition for Disney's live-action retelling of The Little Mermaid four years ago, she didn't assume it would be for the lead. Despite the fact the singer-actor had been writing music since she was eight years old, opened for Beyoncé on the European leg of her Formation Tour at 16 and received five Grammy nominations before reaching the legal drinking age in the US, Bailey couldn't picture herself playing Ariel, the Disney princess who gives up her voice and mermaid tail to be with a "spineless, savage, harpooning fish-eater" human, in the words of Ariel's overprotective father, King Triton, from the 1989 animated original.

"The version of Ariel in my head was the one we all know and love: pale skin and bright red hair. She didn't look like me," the 23-year-old Atlanta native says, dressed in sweats, make-up free, her caramel locs pulled back in a ponytail, as she takes her trainers off and curls up on an overstuffed velvet sofa. Her casual look tonight – a contrast to her event style that mixes up-and-comers such as Cucculelli Shaheen with the venerable Balmain and Valentino – more closely resembles that of a university student taking a study break than the breakout movie star she's poised to be. "Do you want chocolate-chip cookies? They’re famous for that here," she offers, as her assistant, Patrick, brings her a mug of tea.

"Here" is a tiny production room at Westlake Recording Studios in West Hollywood, California, near to her first adult apartment, where Bailey's been spending her evenings working on a solo album. The modest-looking red-brick studio, its lobby still quaintly decorated with foil hearts from Valentine's Day the week before, is famous not only for its fresh-baked cookies but for producing the highest-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson's Thriller. A small space heater sits between us, which Bailey warms her hands over from time to time.

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Best known until now as one half of the pop R&B duo Chloe x Halle – with her older sister, Chlöe, 24 – Bailey caught the eye of The Little Mermaid director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Mary Poppins Returns) after she and Chlöe performed Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack's duet "Where Is The Love" at the 2019 Grammys. "[Producer] John DeLuca and I were watching, and I said, ‘John, who is that? She looks like an angel,’" Marshall recalls. The former choreographer turned director, whose 2002 feature debut, Chicago, garnered six Academy Awards, is widely credited for reviving moviegoer interest in seeing Broadway on the big screen. "I mean, Halle's so beautiful, but she also has an otherworldly sensibility. This was so important for a character that's a mermaid and a teenage girl, who has to have this combination of strength, passion and courage, as well as a kind of naivety and innocence."

Although Bailey only remembers her audition jitters – "I get so nervous. Bubble guts, everything. And I’m like, ‘I’ll probably never hear anything back again’" – Marshall has a vastly different account. "She was the very first actress we saw for the role," he says. "She came in and she sang ‘Part of Your World’. And by the end of it I was crying. I couldn't believe the depth and the truth and the simplicity and passion she brought to the song. It was just so moving." No one ever doubted that Bailey could sing (she and Chlöe were signed to Beyoncé's Parkwood Entertainment label as teens after Queen Bey heard their stunning YouTube covers of her hits). What Bailey was capable of as an actor, however, had gone largely untested. Her biggest role prior to Mermaid had been on Grown-ish, Kenya Barris and Larry Wilmore's Black-ish sitcom spin-off, in which she and Chlöe played twins Sky and Jazz Forster for four series, in addition to writing and performing the show's theme song.

While the shooting of The Little Mermaid has just ended, Vogue reveals everything you need to know about Halle Bailey, the one who will play the mythical Ariel in the movies.

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"Can she hold the film? Can she act with Javier Bardem [King Triton] and Melissa McCarthy [the scene-stealing sea witch Ursula]?" Marshall says of the questions he initially had about Bailey. "But every time she came in, when she read, she got more confidence. She understood nuance, she understood truth and she showed all of those wonderful colours that Ariel needs. "We started to see other people," he adds, of the auditions that followed. "Many other people, hundreds of other people, but the bar had already been set. And no one ever surpassed that bar."

As certain as Marshall was that Bailey had, in his words, "claimed" the role of Ariel from the start, a small but vocal group decried the casting as little more than a "woke" conspiracy. After Bailey was announced as the lead, the Twitter hashtag #NotMyAriel started doing the rounds to argue, in the most vague and incoherent terms, that the entirely fictional mermaid could only be white.

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Bailey was – and continues to be – remarkably unbothered by that static. "I don't really let that affect me," she says. "I mean, I grew up in Georgia. I’m from the Deep South. Being a Black woman, in general, you just know the way things are and how people sometimes are just blatantly racist." Bailey credits her paternal grandparents, natives of Moncks Corner, South Carolina – a town outside of Charleston named after a plantation slaveholder – for grounding her perspective.

"The version of Ariel in my head was the one we all know and love: pale skin and bright red hair. She didn't look like me."

"My nana is 85. My grandpa's a little bit older," she says. Her hands become animated when she speaks, showing off a doughnut-glaze manicure. "I’ve talked to them about their life experiences. My nana would see her family picking cotton and she experienced being restricted to only drinking from a certain water fountain, and the paper bag test." The "brown paper bag test" to which Bailey refers is the discriminatory practice of barring darker-skinned African Americans admittance to various social institutions. The so-called test, a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, continued well into the 20th century. "When I hear my grandparents’ stories, I feel like I’m the luckiest girl in the world," Bailey says. "All of that hate I got is nothing compared to what my ancestors lived in their lifetime."

Born in Atlanta at the start of the new millennium, to parents Doug and Courtney, Bailey has three siblings. Although the prodigious talents possessed by her and Chlöe, who taught themselves how to write music and play instruments, might lead one to believe their household was the 21st-century equivalent of the Mozarts, Bailey paints her early family life with a lighter brush.

"My mom has a pretty voice, but she never wanted to sing," she says. "And my dad can't sing at all. I’m the baby sister, so I would do whatever Chlöe and [elder sister] Ski would, and they were always running around singing. But we were a musical family in the sense that my parents were always playing great music for us: Jill Scott, Janelle Monáe and OutKast, Marsha Ambrosius and Erykah Badu. All the deep R&B, soul, bluesy music was what we grew up hearing." While Bailey calls her older sisters her "safety blankets", she considers their younger brother, Branson, who turns 18 this year, her baby. "I am obsessed with my siblings. But with my baby brother, when I was younger, whenever we would get in trouble and they would try to discipline Branson, I would always be like, ‘No, no, no! Leave him alone.’"

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Bailey's maternal instincts extend to her young fans, whom she also lovingly refers to as "babies". Last September, when the studio released The Little Mermaid's teaser trailer, videos of some of these babies – Black and brown children – reacting to the reveal of Ariel 2.0 went viral. "She's like me!" was the shared sentiment among the girls and boys who not only saw themselves in Bailey's modern mermaid, with her shimmering brown skin and flowing red locs, but who also felt seen by the larger world around them.

"Even just thinking about it makes me emotional," Bailey says, her wide-set eyes beginning to tear up. "Because I still feel like that inside. I feel like that five-year-old. And it made me so filled with love that they know they’re beautiful and that they can be princesses too." She wipes away the tears trailing down her face. "It's that piece I didn't have. It's so healing to see these other babies get that and be able to know that when they get older this will just be normal, you know?" Marshall admits to being surprised, initially, by the viral response. "I did Cinderella with Brandy a long time ago," he says (he served as choreographer on the 1997 Rodgers & Hammerstein telefilm). "But I realised we are still in that time. And when I see these young girls of colour looking at this beautiful actor and thinking, ‘That is me,’ well, that's really what our film is about." He insists the parallel between Bailey's casting and the movie's message was a happy accident. "It's about not being afraid of ‘the other’, the person that's not like you, because, ultimately, we are all one."

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Not only has Disney broken the mould in casting its lead, but The Little Mermaid promises a whole host of delights that befit a new decade. From three new songs by Alan Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda, to an international cast that will see a host of underwater princesses, all daughters of King Triton, representing the world's seven seas, to an appropriately modern update on Ariel's romance with Prince Eric (played by British actor Jonah Hauer-King), the film – and Bailey – are taking the responsibility of its looming global impact seriously.

I ask Bailey, once her tears have dried, if she's a crier. With her baby face and pure soprano voice, it's easy to mistake her for a softie. "I do when it comes to music and things I love, but other than that, no," she says firmly. "I try to stay tough. I’m nice, but if you know me, you know I don't take shit," she adds.

Bailey's toughness was put to the test the week before our interview, when rumours of a break-up with her boyfriend, singer-rapper Darryl Dwayne Granberry Jr, AKA DDG, started trending on Twitter. But by the time we sit down together, it seems that whatever may or may not have occurred between Bailey and her boyfriend has been resolved, and love, like those Valentine hearts still hanging in the studio lobby, presently remains in the air.

"Experiencing deep love for the first time in my life is something I feel has opened a whole new world for me creatively," she says. "What it feels like to love someone other than your family, like somebody you may not have known two years ago but now they’re the centre of your world. I like all of the scary feelings that come with that. I like the suspense, the not knowing what's going to happen, and I feel like that's what I’m supposed to be going through in womanhood.

"It's also deeply sacred," she says of her relationship. "There's a lot of eyes on me now, especially with what's to come. And sometimes I wish I didn't have so many eyes on me, especially experiencing something like this for the first time."

"Experiencing deep love for the first time in my life is something I feel has opened a whole new world for me creatively. I like all of the scary feelings that come with that. I like the suspense, the not knowing what's going to happen."

Bailey credits the year-and-a-half she spent away from her close-knit family in London, shooting The Little Mermaid at Pinewood Studios, for preparing her to experience life on her own terms. "Chlöe is like my mom. Venturing out on my own was scary, but because of the movie I had to be in London and Chlöe had to be home, working," Bailey says. The separation was equally hard for Chlöe, who describes her relationship with Halle in similar terms, but in reverse.

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"Even though she's the baby sister, she would be the one speaking up for me, protecting me. I’d be too scared to speak up for myself, in fear of making anyone uncomfortable. For years I aspired to have even just an ounce of her confidence," Chlöe tells me. She recently released her own solo album, In Pieces, the fruit of her time apart from the sister she calls "a quiet storm".

Speaking up for herself is something Halle had to get used to as well. "On set, I had to walk into the room every day, by myself, alone, where everybody's grown. Everybody's older than me but they’re looking to me for answers. I’d be flying in the air for hours at a time. I’d be in the tanks for hours and hours. Sometimes I’d have to act with nothing. I would hear, you know, Jacob [Tremblay, as Ariel's fish friend, Flounder] and Awkwafina [as seagull Scuttle] in my earpiece, but that was it. So I was talking to the air."

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Marshall compares Bailey's real-time maturation to her character's story arc. "She was 18 when she first auditioned," he explains. "She had her beautiful family around her, but she was ready to push past that. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle."

"Parfois, on me faisait voler dans les airs pendant des heures. D'autres fois, j'étais dans l'eau des journées entières."

When The Little Mermaid wrapped and Bailey finally returned home to Los Angeles, she moved into her own apartment, though it's still in the same building as Chlöe's, albeit on a different floor. Later this year she’ll star in another musical film, the Oprah Winfrey-produced adaptation of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. Walker's daughter, author and screenwriter Rebecca Walker, who serves as an executive producer on the film, says she was "thrilled" when Bailey was cast as Nettie, younger sister to Celie, the story's protagonist.

"[Halle] represents all that is powerful and nourishing and dynamic about emerging young Black women in the creative space," she tells me. "For Nettie in particular, she can draw on her own relationship with her sister to bring something deeply personal to the role. Because it's about staying emotionally connected to home, even as you move beyond it."

Bailey's newfound independence is a theme in her solo album as well, which she describes as a sonic mash-up of her jazz and grunge influences. When she needs to bounce ideas off someone, she has Chlöe and her mentor, Beyoncé. When I ask if she has the most-awarded artist in Grammy history on speed dial, Bailey nods, eyes opening up in wonder, as though she can't quite believe it herself.

"I just played her a lot of my songs and she was really overjoyed for me. It's really cool to have somebody as established and talented as she is give you confirmation that the art you’re creating matters," Bailey says. "She won't outright be like, ‘This is what I think you should do.’ She's very open that way. And to have that since we were 15 is something I do not take for granted." Although Bailey generally views Beyoncé as another older sister figure, that doesn't mean she doesn't fangirl on occasion.

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"We were just in Dubai and saw her show," Bailey says, referring to the one-hour private concert the Renaissance artist was reportedly paid $24 million to stage, heralding the opening of the Atlantis The Royal hotel. "She's so normal in person, but then you see her perform and see how immensely talented and magical her voice is. It's just mind-boggling when I think about it." Low-key in person, but a high-wattage performer? That could easily describe Bailey, too. "I try not to glorify this whole entertainment industry, because it's easy to get caught up in it. I don't try to think of all the stuff that comes with it and how massive it could be, because that's the part that feels like pressure," she says.

As we say goodbye, she gives me a hug and tells me she "appreciates" me, twice, in an old-fashioned way that reflects the familial roots she's determined to stay close to. "When I strip that away and say, ‘God put me here for a reason. I was given this opportunity. Am I giving back and in the right way?’" She smiles. "Hopefully, at the end of this life, wherever and whatever that is, I’ll know I’ve done that."

The Little Mermaid will be in cinemas from 26 May

Article originally published on vogue.co.uk

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