Bailey has been only focusing on the positive when it comes to the reaction to her “The Little Mermaid” casting. When racist viewers stormed the internet after the film’s trailer dropped last year, Bailey instead shared supercuts and montages of young Black girls getting emotional while watching the first footage of her as Ariel.
“People have been sending these reactions to me all weekend and I’m truly in awe,” Bailey wrote on Twitter at the time. “This means the world to me.”
“The Little Mermaid” director Rob Marshall previously told Entertainment Weekly that he had “no agenda” when it came to casting Ariel and that his team auditioned “every ethnicity” for the role before landing on Bailey.
“We just were looking for the best actor for the role, period. The end,” Marshall said. “We saw everybody and every ethnicity. [The goal was to find someone who can be] incredibly strong, passionate, beautiful, smart, clever [and with] a great deal of fire and joy.”
Bailey had all of those qualities, plus the kind of voice the role of Ariel demands. As Marshall explained, “That voice is something that is so signature and so ethereal and so beautiful that it captures the heart of Eric and he looks for her for the entire film.”
Bailey told Variety last year that her family helped her drown out the backlash when the #NotMyAriel hashtag started trending on Twitter. Bailey’s grandparents shared their own memories with her of the racism and discrimination they faced in their lifetimes.
“It was an inspiring and beautiful thing to hear their words of encouragement, telling me, ‘You don’t understand what this is doing for us, for our community, for all the little Black and brown girls who are going to see themselves in you,’” Bailey said.
Disney is set to open “The Little Mermaid” in theaters on May 26, 2023.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
