Halle Bailey On Reinventing Ariel, The Disney Mermaid Princess for British Vogue

Actor, singer talent Halle Bailey takes a May 2023 cover of British Vogue with an interview “Making Waves: Halle Bailey On Reinventing The Disney Princess In The Little Mermaid.”

Law Roach styles the 23-year-old Atlanta native in Dsquared2, Gucci, Philosophy by Lorenzo Serafini, Prada, Ralph Lauren Collection and more in images by Sharif Hamza [IG].

For Hamza, this is his first British Vogue cover after shooting the debut cover and fashion story for Vogue Philippines last fall. The British Filipino-Egyptian photographer’s lineage is of great interest to AOC because it underscores the complexities of modern life when the focus is identity.

Back to Halle Bailey, she is interviewed by Jen Wang about her upcoming role as the lead of Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

“The version of Ariel in my head was the one we all know and love: pale skin and bright red hair. She didn’t look like me,” Bailey tells Wang.

Bailey auditioned her heart out for The Little Mermaid. Rob Marshall was totally spellbound by Halle, but her acting experience was limited — and Ariel is the lead role.

At every step of the way, Marshall found himself immersed in her excellence — even as he put more challenging obstacles in her path.

Marshall believed in his heart that Bailey owned the role with her charming, prodigious talent. But he also created major obstacles for her to not reach the highest bar of his expectations in the audition process.

The MAGA Little Mermaid Revolt

What was cast as more wokeness by the few was nothing more than a white privilege lie [AOC’s words.] No one else auditioning for Ariel could touch Halle Bailey’s command of the role.

After Bailey was announced as the lead, the Twitter hashtag #NotMyAriel started doing the rounds to argue, in the most vague, incoherent — and AOC adds ignorant — terms that the entirely fictional mermaid could only be white. I remember when that happened.

My Revolt Against MAGA Ignorance

The difference between AOC and MAGA is that we educate ourselves. And unless you just reject all of the historical record, and all facts about Denmark and author Hans Christian Andersen, MAGA is drowning in ignorance when they hit Twitter with claims that the author was Danish and therefore the Little Mermaid had to be white.

When I read Halle’s British Vogue interview last night [and being half Scandinavian Danish and Swedish on my mother’s side], I went looking for an AOC post.

There she was in all her glory — the statue of Mary Thomas called ‘I am Queen Mary’, the first public monument to a Black woman in Denmark.

The sculpture was inspired by Mary Thomas, known as one of "the three queens." The three women leaders unleashed the 'Fireburn', an 1878 uprising on St. Croix, in which 50 plantations and most of the town of Frederiksted burned to the ground in what is considered to be the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history.

After her conviction, Mary Thomas was not hanged -- which she surely would have been in America. She was sent to a women's prison in Copenhagen where her statue "I Am Queen Mary' sits in front of an original warehouse for Caribbean sugar and rum, a mere mile from where she was jailed. 

Make no mistake, ‘The Little Mermaid’ is too complex for MAGA, as I explain in the main article in Fashion.

There is major room for a discussion of revisionist history among progressives. Cleopatra is really in the hot seat as we speak.

But The Little Mermaid is not one of them, and MAGA needs to get over it and give this uber-talented young woman Halle Bailey her due. ~ Anne