La La Land is a film in which attractive, talented individuals Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling sing and dance their way around Los Angeles, but originally, it was a film in which attractive, talented individuals Emma Watson and Miles Teller were to sing and dance their way around Los Angeles.
What happened? Rumour has it that Miles Teller demanded more money than the producers were willing to pay, although the official version is that they decided he wasn’t “creatively right” the for the film and moved on without him. Now, in an interview with SiriusXM, Watson has opened up on how she missed out on the role of aspiring actress Mia.
Long story short: she claims she’d already committed to playing Belle in Beauty And The Beast when La La Land was being cast and couldn’t have done it even if she’d wanted to. She explained:
“It’s one of these frustrating things where names get attached to projects very early on as a way to kind of build anticipation or excitement for something that’s coming before anything is really actually agreed or set in stone.”
She went on to describe the workload required for Beast, saying it wasn’t a role she could “just sort of step into”:
“I knew I had horse training, I knew I had dancing, I knew I had three months of singing ahead of me and I knew I had to be in London to really do that. This wasn’t a movie I could just kind of parachute into. I knew I had to do the work, and I had to be where I had to be. So, you know, scheduling conflict-wise, it just didn’t work out.”
La La Land musical director and famed producer Marius De Vries spoke to NME about the film’s casting earlier this year, and gave a slightly different version of events, hinting that Watson was more involved than she lets on. He said:
“I’d actually started working with her on the vocal process and we’d started singing together. Then one day she came in and we were really getting on and she said ‘I’m trying out for another project [Beauty And The Beast], would you mind helping me with that as well?’ So I thought that would be good for our bonding process.”
“So, I helped her sing a couple of Disney songs and packaged up the demos for her and they were sent to the director and then the two projects started to look as if they were going to clash, schedule wise, and she made what must have been a very difficult decision. But she decided that she was better off being Beauty than Mia and so we had to re-think the casting.”
Either way, Emma Stone won an Oscar for La La Land and Beauty And The Beast has broken records for ticket sales before it’s even out, so it all worked out for everyone in the end, which is lovely.
Source: Vanity Fair / NME.
Photo: Axelle / Bauer Griffin / Getty.
