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

While on my amazing adventure in Los Angeles earlier this month; I was able to meet and interview Disney’s Pirate Fairy‘s director, Peggy Holmes; and producer, Jenni Magee-Cook. My daughters are both big fans of the Disney Fairy movies, but my oldest is the biggest fan, which made this interview a bit more special. My daughter also loves to draw and sing, so I was interested in hearing all about how these characters were created and developed. Of course, we were able to screen the movie prior to our interview. This was my favorite Disney Fairy movie yet. I will tell you why in my review of the movie coming up next week!

Here’s a little snippet of our interview with Peggy and Jenni.  I like this Q & A portion because it gives great insite into how much fun these ladies are and what a great time they had directing and producing this movie.  It is amazing to me what a connection they both have to the fairies and keeping them authentic and connected to the original; Peter Pan.

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 [MAKES NOISE] [LAUGHTER] so we had to get him a Disney ‘toon t-shirt.  So that’s a little fun fact.

Image source: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images North America

Here’s our fun group of bloggers who were all at Disney Toon Studios for this interview!
This was truly an amazing and magical experience.

The extended preview of Disney’s Tinkerbell & The Pirate Fairy.

Extended Sneak Peek – The Pirate Fairy on Disney Video

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Disney’s Pirate Fairy official Website