![]() McCarthy cites the confidence that that outlandish performance gave her, so it’s no surprise that she would lean heavily into that passion for drag when it came time to create her Ursula. I talked about being incredibly wealthy and beautiful and living extravagantly.” “I had a gold lamé swing coat on, a huge wig, big eyelashes. ![]() I went by Miss Y,” she said in the Rolling Stone interview, presumably a play on her nickname Missy. “It was me there with my lovely gay guy friends and I was dressed like a big old drag queen. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, she spoke about performing comedy as the drag persona Miss Y in Hell’s Kitchen in the early ’90s. In addition to being a devoted fan of drag, McCarthy herself has a past as a drag performer. Throughout the film’s promotion, McCarthy has touted her love of the artform as inspiration, telling Deadline that she wants to give Divine her due. Now, with Melissa McCarthy’s live-action take hitting screens, the lasting impact of Ursula’s drag origins are as clear as ever. And I said, Howard, is it alright if I steal those? He said, I was hoping you would.” The result is a brilliant performance from Carroll, informed by Ashman’s own take on the character. “I stole ‘ innit’ from Howard,” Carroll confesses, referring to Ursula’s iconic remark. It was from that performance that some of Ursula’s most famous lines were born. But Minkoff, who would later go on to co-direct The Lion King, drew a much more voluptuous take on the character based on the drag queen Divine, who dominated counterculture as a fixture of John Waters’s filmography. And what to do with a character who is so fully formed in the original, there can seem little room for reinterpretation? Such a challenge is posed with The Little Mermaid’s Ursula-a character who not only occupies prime position as one of the most thrillingly evil Disney characters, but who brings with her a lesser known history directly related to the rich and colorful drag tradition.Īccording to animator Rob Minkoff, Ursula was originally described in the script as a Joan Collins–like figure, resulting in character designs that depicted a thin, bony woman with lionfish- or manta ray–inspired features. But such revisions, as seen in the current iteration of The Little Mermaid, also pose a challenge: The new mechanisms-look at those hyper-realistic CGI animals-run the risk of falling ironically flat when juxtaposed against the elegant creations of the original. There are many reasons-beyond the lack of original IP-for a studio to reinvent a classic film: updating it to better reflect our diverse world, introducing it to a whole new audience, invoking the nostalgia of those who love the original.
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