'Mamma Mia 2' star says it was 'like rocket science' trying to get male stars to dance properly
- The cast and director of "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" told Vulture that the male stars were bad dancers.
- Christine Baranski, who plays Tanya, says it was "like rocket science" teaching them to dance in sync.
Vulture spoke to a number of the cast and crew of "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" as part of a recent retrospective on the movie that split audiences.
Notably, the director Ol Parker and the cast touched on the final scene that sees the characters from both stories perform "Super Trouper" together, with Meryl Streep also reprising her role as Donna albeit as a ghost.
Christine Baranski, who played the present version of Tanya, told Vulture that dancing didn't come naturally to the original actors for the dads (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård).
"I don't think the three actors would mind my saying — Colin and Stellan and Pierce — just to get them to sing the song and put one foot in front of another and raise a glass of beer together, it was like rocket science," she said. "I think people understood that it was something very tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing. None of us were seasoned musical-comedy performers. I've done musicals, but I wouldn't characterize my career as mainly musical comedy."
Parker, the director and screenwriter of the sequel, said they had to digitize Skarsgård's mouth because he was so out of time during the song.
"And if you watch them, fuck me, you can see how arrhythmic they all are," the director said. "Stellan, I think we digitized his mouth, because he went, 'Oom-pah-pah,' at the wrong time. How hard is it to do that? It's a disaster, every shot. But we just get away with it."
He added: "Part of the fun is watching these guys make absolute twats of themselves with complete abandon. Watch it again, and you'll see how much they all suck."
The director also told Vulture that it was "astonishing" that actors who could sing were not hired for the first "Mamma Mia!"
"I remember when [Dominic] Cooper turned up and couldn't sing. There's a whole bunch of young guys as handsome as Dom — lovely as he is, a really good guy, really good actor. But I'm sure they could have found someone that could sing."
Skarsgård, who played one of Sophie's dads Bill, told Vulture that he was aware of his lack of ability when it came to singing and dancing.
"When they cast me and Colin for the first film, we knew we weren't cast because we would sing and dance," the 70-year-old actor said. "We were cast just as, like, the bimbos that should be cute and funny. It really was like a community theater project. Some things that you've come up with are accepted and some are not, and you feel absolutely safe and free."