It’s a rainy afternoon in Beverly Hills, and Halle Bailey is coziness personified. Curled up on a hotel couch wearing a teal Ivy Park hoodie and matching shorts, she sips the green tea she ordered us from room service and wants to talk about…reality TV. Upon hearing that I’ve never seen one of her favorite shows, she audibly gasps. “Love After Lockup is amazing,” she says, describing the premise of the We TV show, which documents the love lives of former inmates after they’re released from prison. “Some of [their] partners buy houses for them and go all out and truly fall in love. It’s so good. You have to watch it.”
The fact that the 23-year-old has time to watch even a single episode feels like a scheduling feat of epic proportion. At the time of our meeting in March, the singer and actor had spent the last nine days logging multiple studio sessions for her forthcoming solo album, wrapping up postproduction work for her role in the upcoming musical movie adaptation of 1985 drama The Color Purple, and planning a birthday trip “someplace warm” the following week. And then there were the Academy Awards.
“The Oscars were amazing,” Bailey says. “I had so much anxiety and nervousness because it was the big debut of the trailer, but it ended up being a fairy-tale kind of night.”
The trailer, of course, is for the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, in which Bailey stars as Ariel. “It’s been a long time coming,” Bailey says of the film’s release, which is one the year’s most anticipated movies. “I auditioned for the film when I was 18, and I turned 23 this year.” As she tells it, the journey began in 2019, when she got an email from her agent saying director Rob Marshall wanted her to audition for his adaptation of the 1989 animated classic. Bailey assumed she’d be auditioning for “one of the sisters or something like that” but later learned Marshall had watched her performance at the Grammys earlier that year and thought she’d make the perfect Disney princess. It took a minute for it to sink in that she was being sought for the lead.
“I was almost just paralyzed with fear,” Bailey says, adding that she leaned heavily on her sister Chlöe to help her prepare. “We’d run it and we’d run it and we’d run it, over and over,” she says of her audition tape, which included two scenes and a performance of the seminal song “Part of Your World.” A trip to New York to meet Marshall and producer John DeLuca followed. Then came a series of callbacks followed by the all-important screen test that included a mock costume and a fake set. Then the waiting began.
“I didn’t hear anything for a while—a few months actually,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, well, I guess I didn’t get it.’ I forgot about it completely.” And then came a phone call in July 2021 from a strange number, one Bailey said she’d seen pop up a few times and ignored. Eventually, at the insistence of her father, her sister, and her younger brother—all hanging out in the family’s garage studio that summer day—she picked up.
“I freaked out, I was screaming,” she says of her reaction to the news that she’d been cast as Ariel. “I was like, Is this real life?” Then, she says, “I was catapulted into this new world.”
Born in Mableton, Georgia, Bailey moved to Dunwoody, a suburb of Atlanta, at age eight before relocating in late 2012 with her parents and three siblings to Los Angeles, where she and Chlöe formed their musical duo, Chloe x Halle, when they were 13 and 11, uploading covers of pop and R&B hits to their YouTube channel. Their rendition of “Pretty Hurts” went viral in 2013, and two years later they signed to Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment. By 2021 the sisters had released two albums and earned four Grammy nominations.
When Bailey was offered the part of Ariel, she was accustomed to fame, but not as a solo act. She told Chlöe she didn’t think she could do it, and her sister scoffed at the self-doubt. Bailey recalls her saying, “You must, you have to, and you have to fly. This is your moment.” The message resonated, and Bailey soon found herself on set, filming alongside costars Javier Bardem (King Triton), Melissa McCarthy (Ursula the Sea Witch), Jonah Hauer-King (Prince Eric), and Jacob Tremblay (Flounder). For a young woman who grew up idolizing Ariel—but also internalizing that aspirational characters rarely, if ever, looked like her—the opportunity was profound.
“I remember Ariel being the reason I wanted to swim,” says Bailey, who fell in love with the original Little Mermaid when she was five. “When I saw her, [I was] like, ‘She’s so beautiful; I want to be a mermaid too.’ She didn’t look like me, but I was okay with that because it was what I was used to at the time.”
Earlier this year, when the first images of Bailey as Ariel started circulating on social media, the magnitude of the moment—a palpable shift toward a new normal—was felt globally. Videos of young Black girls gleefully reacting to an Ariel they identified with flooded the internet. “When I saw those for the first time, I just cried,” Bailey says. “I was sobbing uncontrollably. The fact that these babies are looking at me and feeling the emotions that they’re feeling is a really humbling, beautiful thing.”
The representation means a lot to Bailey too. Growing up, she says she was moved by the 2009 Disney animated film The Princess and the Frog, in which actor and singer Anika Noni Rose plays the titular princess. “I know how much of that movie changed my whole perspective on life,” she says. “Wow, this is possible. Black princesses are possible. We deserve to take up these spaces too.”
While the live-action Mermaid pulls heavily from the original’s plot and key themes—a young girl seeking independence from her insular, underwater world—Bailey’s take on Ariel is more nuanced. “I really hope that I put my own stamp on her character by showing more of her vulnerability,” she says, adding that there are parallels between her own life and Ariel’s. “I felt like I could relate to her growing up in a big family and having older sisters to guide you, and having a father that's very protective and overbearing at times but loves so hard.” Beautywise, the famous mermaid now has locs.
“[Ariel still] has red hair, because that’s a very iconic part of her, but I really did admire the fact that because I’m a Black woman and I have locs, [the producers] wanted to incorporate that into Ariel’s look.” Hairstylist Camille Friend was tasked with a transformation that entailed dyeing Bailey’s roots red and wrapping her locs with hair the same shade; Kat Ali oversaw makeup. “They’re both women of color, so I felt very comfortable,” Bailey says. “They know how to take care of me and my hair and makeup. I’ve been on sets before where that’s not the case.”
Filming took place in London over the course of six months amid the COVID pandemic and the UK shutdown. Though it was “gloomy all the time” and Bailey was away from her family—a first for her—“it was a really cool learning experience and time of development for me on my own,” she says. And along the way she built meaningful relationships with her costars. In Bardem she found an encouraging, seasoned actor who, despite his serious demeanor, is “also the kindest teddy bear man ever.” Newcomer Hauer-King, Bailey says, “will be one of my best friends forever.” The pair spent the most screen time together, bonding over a grueling shoot schedule that saw them jumping off a boat one day and suspended in the air the next. In McCarthy she found a blueprint. “At the end of the film, when we wrapped, I had learned how to speak up for myself,” Bailey says, crediting her newfound confidence to the example set by the actor. “When I watched her go on set, she was like, ‘This is what I want.’ Seeing another woman come in there, command space, and own her power and know who she is as an individual was really inspiring.”
In a sign that landing a role in a major motion picture wasn’t a fluke, Bailey received an audition request for the forthcoming musical film iteration of The Color Purple, backed by Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, while still shooting The Little Mermaid. In London, Bailey self-taped her audition for a young Nettie—the younger sister of the film’s protagonist, Celie, to be played by R&B singer and actor Fantasia Barrino who’d performed the role on Broadway in 2007—and learned that she had landed the part shortly after filming wrapped on Mermaid.
The pressure Bailey had already started to feel about her next project, she says, began to wane. The movie’s musical element was a perfect fit, and the cast was particularly exciting for her. “I’m working with legends who I’m such fans of, like Fantasia and Taraji P. Henson,” she says. Likening the set to a family reunion, she appreciated the respite of having a smaller role than in The Little Mermaid. “Also, I got to be country and talk in my Georgia, Southern accent, which was fun for me.” Bailey went into the project with understandable nerves—“the first one is so iconic you almost don’t want to touch something as precious as that, and the same with Mermaid,” she says—but is pleased with the outcome. “I think people will be really proud of the new version.”
Like most young women who grow up in front of the world, both Bailey and her sister have been confronted with criticism as they mature and branch out creatively. Commentary that their performances, personal style, and social media posts are too sexy abounds online, much of it aimed at Chlöe’s performance in the Janine Nabers– and Donald Glover–created Amazon Prime series Swarm (which Bailey also says I need to watch, and I binged it days after our interview). “I honestly don’t care,” she says. “I’m so proud of my sister for always moving confidently and being herself.”
Bailey tries to model that same behavior when questions and opinions about her relationship with her boyfriend, Darryl Dwayne Granberry Jr.—known professionally as rapper DDG—arise. “It’s really funny how people look at you [as] still being this young girl, still being this innocent, untouchable thing,” she says. “I appreciate that as I venture into adulthood, I’m able to make my own decisions.” And when it comes to the details of her personal life, one of those decisions is discretion. “For my peace and my sanity, I have to keep that private.”
Leading up to the release of The Little Mermaid this Friday, Bailey has been mindful to not let the attention overwhelm her. “Mentally, sometimes it’s really difficult being in this industry,” she says, “knowing that there are so many opinions [about] you and what you’re doing, or what you should be or what you could be doing better. People sometimes put you on this pedestal. They forget that you’re a real human being. They forget that you have feelings, that you cry.” She often finds reprieve in simple pleasures. “I love hiking, I love hot yoga, I love playing my guitar, I love making jewelry.” She’s incredibly close to her cat, Poseidon—a 21st-birthday gift from her siblings, who was named as an ode to her role as Ariel. She finds peace in the kitchen. “I’ve been vegan for 12 years, [but] I’m happy that I have the experience of growing up in Georgia and making turkey burgers and chicken and steaks, so I know how to apply that to whoever is not vegan in my life.”
Having lived with her family her entire life before relocating to London to film The Little Mermaid, Bailey returned to LA and settled into her first solo apartment—in the same building as Chlöe’s. “It’s nice because we’re neighbors and she’s always there when I need her, but we have our own space.” Hers, she says, is “wacky” and colorful; filled with floor pillows and awash in fake plants and mirrors she impulsively bought on Amazon. “I have a problem with online shopping,” she admits, though—save for splurging on a pair of knee-high Miu Miu boots recently in Milan—she mostly scours Instagram for young Black designers, like Faë Sapienta and Kwame Adusei.
Bailey tells me that, had she not pursued a career in entertainment, she could see herself being a nurse or a pediatrician or maybe a kindergarten teacher. I ask if she ever craves the relative normalcy of life outside the Hollywood bubble. “It’s fun to think about,” she says, “but honestly, no, because this has been my normal for so long.” Instead she’s careful not to let her work as an artist and entertainer distract from the purpose she’d like to fulfill. “The awards and the accolades and the people complimenting, it’s all great, but what [am I] here for really? What am I doing to give it back to God? What am I doing actively to be a better person every single day?”
I’d argue that her historic role as Ariel is indeed part of her larger purpose, and something she is—and should be—remarkably proud of. “I've never done anything like this before,” she says of stepping outside her comfort zone. “I've never seen myself on a big screen, so when I see myself there, I'm just like, ‘Is that me? Did I really do that?’” And the pride she feels will, undoubtedly, be matched by young women and girls everywhere this Friday, the same ones who couldn’t contain their excitement watching Bailey in the Little Mermaid trailer. “When I watch the babies react and they're proud of me, it almost heals something within me and my spirit,” she says. “I get really emotional when I think about it and when I see the reactions. It's just lovely.”
Photographers: AB + DM
Styling: Justin Hamilton
Hair: Tinisha Meeks
Makeup: Christiana Cassell
Manicure: Yoko Sakakura
Prop styling: Carlos Lopez/Winston Studios
Production: Ilona Klaver
Writer: Leah Faye Cooper
