Halle Bailey On Intense ‘Little Mermaid’ Swimming Stunts: ‘Your Core Is Burning All Day But It’s Worth It’
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Disney’s live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” is on the horizon, and star Halle Bailey is opening up about the intense training she undertook to pull off the film’s underwater sequences.
In a new Entertainment Weekly feature about the upcoming movie, Bailey revealed that she spent most of her time in production locked into a tuning fork, which locks an actor into a harness that can be spun and rotated in order to simulate swimming.
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Meanwhile, other stunts required her to be suspended from wires, or a combination of the two.
“It was an intense routine of having to be in the gym by like 4 a.m., working out before you go to stunts, and then you’re on the harness and in that world in the air for hours at a time and your core is burning all day, and your legs and your arms,” Bailey recalled.
Despite the discomfort, Bailey said she enjoyed every second. “I loved being able to feel like I could fly,” she gushed.
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Javier Bardem, who plays King Triton, concurred.
“It was like [being] at Disney Parks in the rides,” Bardem said of filming those swimming sequences. “You have to be in shape because those arms have to be there. And most importantly, you have to have a strong core. You really have to do some gymnastics.”
Meanwhile, Bardem admitted being relieved that his King Triton, unlike the animated version, doesn’t go shirtless throughout the movie. “I’m not Dwayne Johnson. I’m not Brad Pitt,” he joked.
