Halle Bailey Is the Moment—And a Movie Star in the Making
It’s a rainy afternoon in Beverly Hills, and Halle Bailey is coziness personified. Curled up on a hotel couch wearing a teal Ivy Park hoodie and matching shorts, she sips the green tea she ordered us from room service and wants to talk about…reality TV. Upon hearing that I’ve never seen one of her favorite shows, she audibly gasps. “Love After Lockup is amazing,” she says, describing the premise of the We TV show, which documents the love lives of former inmates after they’re released from prison. “Some of [their] partners buy houses for them and go all out and truly fall in love. It’s so good. You have to watch it.” The fact that the 23-year-old has time to watch even a single episode feels like a scheduling feat of epic proportion. At the time of our meeting in March, the singer and actor had spent the last nine days logging multiple studio sessions for her forthcoming solo album, wrapping up postproduction work for her role in the upcoming musical movie adaptation of 1985 drama The Color Purple, and planning a birthday trip “someplace warm” the following week. And then there were the Academy Awards. “The Oscars were amazing,” Bailey says. “I had so much anxiety and nervousness because it was the big debut of the trailer, but it ended up being a fairy-tale kind of night.” The trailer, of course, is for the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, in which Bailey stars as Ariel. “It’s been a long time coming,” Bailey says of the film’s release, which is one the year’s most anticipated movies. “I auditioned for the film when I was 18, and I turned 23 this year.” As she tells it, the journey began in 2019, when she got an email from her agent saying director Rob Marshall wanted her to audition for his adaptation of the 1989 animated classic. Bailey assumed she’d be auditioning for “one of the sisters or something like that” but later learned Marshall had watched her performance at the Grammys earlier that year and thought she’d make the perfect Disney princess. It took a minute for it to sink in that she was being sought for the lead.
Via: Glamour
