For “The Little Mermaid” director Rob Marshall, it was natural to include original Ariel voice actress and singer Jodi Benson in his live-action remake, and not just because two generations of Ariel actresses meet. Rob Marshall, who started his career on Broadway, and stage actress Benson have known each other for 40 years and performed musicals together – and it was also thanks to this long-standing friendship that Jodi Benson now has a guest appearance on The Little Mermaid.
“We thought if you could do it in a way that felt organic and not too wanted, it would be just perfect to have her in the movie,” explains Marshall. . And so Benson should not be seen as a mermaid in the new “Arielle”, which may have had the “intended” effect suggested by Marshall, but as a human.
The Dingelhopper is passed on
Jodi Benson plays a native of the Caribbean kingdom ruled by Prince Eric’s mother, Queen Selena (Noma Dumezweni). She is one of the women in the market that Ariel Incarnate (Hal Bailey) with Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) comes to visit – and gives Arielle a fork when she wants something to eat. But Arielle, of course, thinks this is a hairdressing device, a dingle hopper, and starts twisting her hair.
That doesn’t feel intentional, but skillful! Because even though Benson’s cameo appearance is very small and unremarkable and has nothing to do with flukes, something important happens here: one Ariel gives another a dingle hopper, this cult object from Disney’s “Arielle” movies. “It’s literally like she’s passing the torch,” Marshall says of the scene.
In the 1989 cartoon The Little Mermaid, Ariel combs her hair with a fork while sitting at the dinner table at Eric’s castle – and of course gets a lot of quirky looks. Rob Marshall didn’t think that was right for his remake: not even a mermaid would start combing her hair while she was eating, whether it was with a fork or a brush. So the idea of the marketplace was born – and adding Jodi Benson’s cameo there seemed perfect.