Interview With Disney Pirate Fairy’s Peggy Holmes and Jenni Magee-Cook

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While we were in LA, one of the things we did was to interview Disney’s Pirate Fairy‘s director, Peggy Holmes; and producer, Jenni Magee-Cook.  I’ve not seen any of the Tinkerbell movies (having a son) but it was interesting hearing how these characters were created and the movie was developed.  There is more to it then you might think!  We did get to screen the movie as well, and I will tell you my thoughts about that shortly.

Eaten alive….

Here is a portion of our interview with the ladies-

Question: Tell us about Christina Hendricks’ character, the new dust-keeper fairy, Zarina.

Jenni Magee-Cook:  We really, really wanted you to like her. We wanted to find a character that was likable but yet you could understand made a big mistake, and goes away. She also had to be powerful. I mean, she’s a seven-inch fairy fighting pirates. So she’s got to be vulnerable and sweet out front. But then she’s got to be tough when she’s a pirate, so it took a really big range of acting and Christina Hendricks is amazing. We all knew her from Mad Men and knew she could have that sharp tough wit, but such a sensitive soft side to her also.

She’s a huge Disney fan, so we showed her around the building and we were in the story room showing her art. She just was totally into the story and then it dawned on her… she was going to be a fairy! And that was huge, because she and her husband go to Disneyland all the time. They don’t have kids, but they love it. To become a fairy and part of the Disney legend, she was just thrilled.

Question: This is an amazing movie with an amazing cast.  How did the casting go about?

Peggy Holmes:    Well the series, the, the Fairies Franchise series, our main girls Tinker Bell, Silvermist, Rosetta, Iridessa, and, um, Fawn and Vidia have all been cast since the beginning.  Right.  So that’s we-we have Jason Henkel here who’s like our casting director.  And he’s fantastic.  And then in this particular case, the cast we added which was, um, Christina Hendricks and Tom Hiddleston, we worked with Jason, we talked about sort of what we wanted the, what the characters were like. And then he brings a list to us and in this case they are our top picks for each character, which was incredible.

Jenni Magee-Cook:    It’s unusual and it was amazing, because obviously-

Peggy Holmes:    Do you want to talk about Christina a little bit?

Jenni Magee-Cook:   Yeah-yeah-yeah.  Christina I mean we really wanted that character to come- there were a couple of things.  We really-really wanted you to like her.  And we wanted a, we wanted to find a character that was likeable but yet you could understand made a big mistake, and goes away.  But also had to be powerful, I mean, she’s a seven inch fairy fighting pirates.  So she’s got to be vulnerable and sweet out front.  But then she’s got to be tough when she’s a pirate, so it took a really big range of acting and Christina Hendricks is amazing.  And we all knew her from Mad Men and we knew she could have that sharp tone- tough wit, but she has such a sensitive soft side to her also.  And she has such a passion for this passion and really excited by coming in and doing a fairy.  She’s a, a huge Disney fanatic, so remember we showed her around the building and we were in the story room showing her art and she- she just was totally in the story about how it dawned on her.  She was going to be a fairy.  And that was huge, ’cause her and her husband go to Disneyland I guess all the time.  And they don’t have kids and then so they love it.  And so to become a fairy and part of the Disney legend, she was just thrilled to do and you can see that on the screen what she brought.

Peggy Holmes:    So then Tom, uh, Tom Hiddleston was, uh, like well okay, first choice yes, he did it, which was just amazing.  And one of the great, uh, one of the great things about Tom is first of all he’s a triple threat right.  he can sing dance and act, which is amazing.
He’s got a really, um, extensive, um, education background at RADA and things like that.  And so, um, one of the things that Tom really understood for this character is that Hook is a bigger than life character, right.  So Hook is a bigger than life character.  So Tom, uh, we listened to the original book Hans Conried and what Tom understood very clearly was that was a big performance but believable for the day.  Right, it was a completely believable villain for the day.  And that’s what Tom understood was how to then get a bigger than life character, a bigger than life performance that was believable for today’s audience.  And Tom got that right off the bat.  And had so much fun giving us little glimpses of aha- like the big laughs and just giving us little glimpses, ’cause he’s only twenty years old.  You know, our thought was, you know, he’s like twenty two, something like that.  Our thought was that, that basically [CLEARS THROAT] Hook is not as bitter, and evil as he is in Peter Pan yet.  Because he hasn’t had all the failures.  But you can see he’s going to start to have a lot of failures and a lot of things that go wrong for him.  And he’s got big ideas that just don’t work out.  You know, so Tom really had a handle on kind of how to make this a, make this character super charming and loyal and, you know, very unassuming.  And then make that flip, which was great.  And then we actually have for you a little sneak peek, we have a little behind the scenes of Tom recording the song and talking about the character.  So let’s take a look.

Jenni Magee-Cook:    And this was an actual session, not a mockup.  Part of it was in the movie, but you’ll see the real session when we recorded him.

Peggy Holmes:    There he is [LAUGHTER] see that white shirt right here –  while they’re getting this together.  The, um, uh, the shirt was, uh, starched very starched, he looked very lovely as he came in to record.  And so starched, he’s so physical when he gets up to record, he’s like moving his body and doing this.  And the shirt was going SWOOSH SWOOSH [LAUGHTER] so we had to get him a Disney ‘toon t-shirt.  So that’s a little fun fact.

Question: How was Tom Hiddleston, who played a young Captain Hook named James?

Peggy Holmes: Tom Hiddleston was just amazing. Tom understood he needed to get a bigger-than-life character, a bigger-than-life performance that was believable for today’s audience. And Tom got that right off the bat. Our thought was that basically Hook is not as bitter and evil as he is in Peter Pan yet because he hasn’t had all the failures. But you can see he’s going to start to have a lot of failures and a lot of things that go wrong for him. He’s got big ideas that just don’t work out. So Tom really had a handle on how to make this character super charming and loyal and, you know, very unassuming. And then make that flip, which was great.

Christina Hendricks (‘Mad Men’) and Tom Hiddleston (Thor) are the voices of Zarina (the misunderstood dust-keeper fairy) and a young Captain Hook (picture via disneymovies.com)

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