The Director Rob Marshall on Halle Bailey as The Little Mermaid
The live-action remake of Disney\u2019s classic \u201cThe Little Mermaid\u201d is out this weekend. The performance of Halle Bailey as Princess Ariel has been widely praised, but some on the right lambasted the casting of a Black actress in the role as an example of\u2014of course\u2014wokeness on the part of Disney. The film\u2019s director, Rob Marshall, dismisses the notion as quickly as he can. \u201cIt was never: \u2018Let\u2019s do a woke version of \u2018Little Mermaid,\u2019 \u201d he tells Naomi Fry. \u201cIt was: \u2018Let\u2019s just do the best version.\u2019 \u201d Marshall took an unusual path toward directing: he began his career as a dancer on Broadway, moving to film only after becoming injured while performing in \u201cCats.\u201d Since then, he has directed \u201cChicago,\u201d \u201cMemoirs of a Geisha,\u201d and \u201cMary Poppins Returns.\u201d For \u201cThe Little Mermaid,\u201d he drew inspiration from the original Hans Christian Andersen text, which he says is a coming-of-age story about a young girl who breaks down barriers to understand herself and the world around her. \u201cI just felt, wow, isn\u2019t that the world we live in?,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean for me, the whole time I was doing this movie, it felt really like an antidote to the times we\u2019re living in, the divisive world we live in.\u201d