The Little Mermaid is the latest Disney classic to be remade in live-action, and it’s hitting theaters later this month. The new version stars Halle Bailey as Ariel, Daveed Diggs as Sebastian, Javier Bardem as King Triton, Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric, Jacob Tremblay as Flounder, Awkwafina as Scuttle, and Melissa McCarthy as Ursula. This week, ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with some of the cast about the movie, including McCarthy and Bardem. Both Ursala and King Triton have elaborate costumes in the film, but their bottom halves are obviously CGI. We asked the duo what they actually wore on set, and how the underwater scenes were created.
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“We’re naked,” Bardem joked. “Yeah, naked. We made a pact,” McCarthy added with a laugh. “We did our Marlon Brando routine, which is being in our bathing suits,” Bardem added. “I just wore, like, leggings and you know, little stunt pads all over them, because I was always sliding and flipping around,” McCarthy added, more seriously. “Everything from the hips up was real.”
McCarthy went on to explain how the underwater scenes were created with CGI.
“I’ve never seen anything look like that. I just can’t process how technically impossible that seemed to be and how you never thought about it, just watching you’re like, ‘Of course, I’m underwater.’ At one point, I’m like, ‘God, Halle’s eyes, just the water doesn’t seem to bother her at all. No! What are you talking about?’ I was like, ‘You’re nuts. You were there.’” She added, “Every hair is digital, all the movement. You know, we each had, what, like seven, eight people that were a part of our team to help keep that kind of undulating… It took a lot of people to make it look so effortless.”
We also spoke with director Rob Marshall about the challenges of the underwater scenes.
“It was definitely daunting and a challenge. I mean, as I started, I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ But I have to say,
if I hadn’t done all my movies prior to this, I wouldn’t have been really ready for this one because it was so complicated. I mean,
everything had to be choreographed in advance so that we could actually take all of that information and give it to our stunt team.” He added, “All of the underwater work was literally done on rigs, you know, apparatuses, wires. And sometimes in one scene, you know, many times in one scene, they’d say two lines. I’d say ‘cut,’ and we’d put on another apparatus for a couple more lines. It was all done in little pieces, like a mosaic for even just one scene.”
Marshall continued, “So you have water being added, you have the backgrounds and fish and all the vegetable ocean being added. But then you also have hair, like every strand of hair being added … And also, of course, their tails and their costumes. So a lot of the costumes were all designed, everything was designed and set, but it had to be digitally added.”
The Little Mermaid swims into theaters on May 26th
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