Did you feel like you were making a stage musical?
For sure. We were like a crazy company of actors.
And out of all the numbers, what was the most difficult?
I mean, “The Cover is Not the Book” is a raunchy, big old musical number. And I remember when they wrote that song, I just said, “You know what, can I try it in a crazy cockney accent?” And they said, “Sure, do you want to?” And I said, “Rob, I just think it could be really cool.” For Mary, I think that these adventures and these moments, they’re her outlet. She’s like an adrenalin junkie and so you’ve got to see the shift from the sternness and the enigmatic sort of holding-at-arm’s-length and then like heroin in the veins when she goes into these adventures. She’s just like, “Yeah!” So I wanted to see that in the numbers as well. It’s when I said, “You’ve got to really see her laughing and smiling and engaging in a way that she doesn’t in the real world.” Rob was very supportive of that. It was finding those private moments of enjoyment of it all, relishing it all. But then with the big dancing, I said, “I think this should be like, her moment. This should be her Liza Minnelli moment.”
That’s actually my favorite song in the whole movie.
It’s cool, isn’t it?
It’s so good. But also you guys have that great number with Meryl where the…
Oh, so much fun. “Turning Turtle.”
Where the room flips upside down. From a layman’s point of view that appears complicated to work out. Was it easier than it looked?
I think the more complicated ones were the animated sequences just because we were doing a lot of green screen and you’re having to interact with a tennis ball or a man in a green suit. It was all of that sort of, and it was challenging for the kids as well, who’ve never, especially Joel [Dawson], who’s the little blonde one [Georgie Banks], who’d never done anything like this before. And you’d have Rob on the mic going, “And Joel, there’s an elephant and then there’s a monkey on your head. Honey, honey react!” And it was so crazy. I would say Meryl’s such a pro, so it was like doing a scene where she’s taking command of the environment and you know you’re in good hands. Even as wacky, as bonkers as that number was. That’s actually her swinging on the chandelier if you can believe it.
Are you serious?
Which is crazy. She said, and this is my favorite Meryl moment, she said in the middle of walking through the scene, she turns and she goes, “Hey kids, have you ever seen a pratfall?” And the kids were like, “No.” She went from vertical [she gestures to flat on the ground] like that and landed on her face like that and was completely fine. It was something she’d learned at Yale.
How do you do that?
I don’t know! Honestly, I thought that I thought, “She’s dead. That’s it. That’s how Meryl Streep went, doing a pratfall.” It was incredible.
I’ve got time for one last question. Did you see the final movie by yourself the first time? I’m not sure I could see it with anyone else if I were you.
I did see it by myself for the first time.
Was there a moment watching it when you were like, “Oh, it worked!” How did you know?
Oh, I think I knew the moment it [began]. I just, I knew, I have such faith in Rob Marshall. I just have the utmost, I’ve never had more faith in anyone in my life. I have such faith in Rob Marshall because I just knew he was going to make it. He knows how to dig for the gold, he knows how to capture the magic, he’s so meticulous about everything that I knew no rock had been… oh, what’s the phrase? Unturned.
“Mary Poppins Returns” opens nationwide on Dec. 19.
