It was a long process to bring a live-action The Little Mermaid to the screen, as star Halle Bailey knows all too well. Before she shot to fame as the new Ariel, Glamour‘s latest cover star was half of a well-loved singing duo with her sister Chlöe, and just one of the starlets Disney was considering for its reimagining of the 1989 animated classic.
In 2019, her agent told her that, after seeing her perform at the Grammys, director Rob Marshall wanted her for an audition. Bailey figured the part was “one of the sisters or something like that,” she told Glamour exclusively. Because “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,” Bailey revealed to British Vogue. She was both shocked and thrilled to learn she was being considered for the lead.
Just 18 at the time, “I was almost just paralyzed with fear,” she recalled, adding that Chlöe helped her prepare her initial audition tape. “We’d run it and we’d run it and we’d run it, over and over.” Then there were in-person auditions, callbacks, screen tests…and a lot of waiting. “I didn’t hear anything for a while—a few months actually,” she said. “I was like, ‘Okay, well, I guess I didn’t get it.’ I forgot about it completely.”
To Marshall’s recollection, the part was hers to lose. The director told British Vogue that despite early questions about her acting prowess, “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 colors that Ariel needs…We started to see other people…Many other people, hundreds of other people, but the bar had already been set. And no one ever surpassed that bar.”
Still, Bailey found herself “freaked out, I was screaming,” when she got the call that she’d nabbed the part. Four years and a pandemic later, audiences will finally get to meet her mermaid. As Bailey says, ”It’s been a long time coming.”
