Cruella’s Cast Reveals How Much Inspiration They Pulled From 101 Dalmatians

Cruella is hitting theatres and Disney+ Premier Access next week and will feature a handful of characters Disney fans know and love from 101 Dalmatians. The movie is a prequel to the beloved animated film from 1961 and will feature Emma Stone as Cruella as well as Joel Fry as Jasper, Paul Walter Hauser as Horace, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Anita. Recently, ComicBook.com and the chance to chat with Fry, Hauser, and Howell-Baptiste as well as the movie's director, Craig Gillespie. Not only did they address whether or not they'd want to play the characters again in another 101 Dalmatians remake, but they also revealed if they pulled any inspiration from the original cartoon or the 1996 movie.

"It's just funny because we went back and watched the animated feature and there's not a lot of meat on that bone. There's not much to take from. So I was ripping off Bob Hoskins' voice from the movie Hook," Hauser revealed. "That was my inspiration for Horace, personally."

"Yeah. I didn't look back at any of those," Fry added. "I didn't try enough. I just thought about the thin arms and legs and the fact that Jasper didn't have much patience for Horace's talking, and that's kind of the bit from it really." Hauser joked, "That's how Joel feels about me as well, so it kind of worked."

"What's interesting is I've obviously been doing all these interviews and Paul was talking about this. He was like, you know, for their character, for Paul and Joel's character of Jasper and Horace, there wasn't a lot of meat on the bone is how Paul described it. So they kind of had to build and I feel similarly to Anita," Howell-Baptiste explained.

She added, "It's like, we have definitely seen Anita. There's no shortage of her in any of the stories, but I think we see kind of one side of her, we see her as this very kind gentle mother homemaker figure. And I think in some ways, actually, that was beneficial to me because I got to make Anita to the way I wanted her to be. I wasn't trying to recreate anything that I had ever seen before. I got to go, who is this Anita for this generation and who is Anita to me."

"I didn't, I really didn't," Gillespie replied when asked about pulling inspiration from the older stories. "I wanted to stay away from the Glenn Close version because Emma Stone has to create this character. And I felt like the fact that we're stars, I just wanted to be in it and not, I just stayed away from that. I knew for me, I really wanted to embrace this 1970s gritty London punk version of it, and so we were sort of starting with that and her character had to come out of that. And so we really had to sort of create new and create the tone of her. So I didn't look at that at all. And then the crazy thing with the 101 Dalmatians, she's such a delight to watch, Cruella, and you love that she's got this humor and sort of narcissistic like biting tone to her, but we don't know anything about her. I mean, she went to school with Anita and that's about it. So in some ways it's remarkably liberating,"

He continued, "We said, "Okay, we got to put them in school together." And then anything from there till like when she's 50, we're kind of open range, she likes fashion. So we got to really just sort of discover it. And just again, it's like, I'd come off of I, Tonya, where I was really excited. I got to like lean into my instincts on I, Tonya, and really go for it. And I just wanted to do it again with this. So I felt like Disney was giving me that opportunity. You know, they wanted, they were willing to swing for it on this. And so I didn't want to disappoint."

You can watch our full interview with Hauser and Fry at the top of the page.

Cruella will be released in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access on May 28th.