Sophia Michaels
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Yara Shadidi thought she was going to get to fly all over the place to bring Tinkerball to life in the new movie “Peter Pan & Wendy,” streaming now on Disney+. “I thought I was going to be doing some crazy wire work,” she tells POPSUGAR. That was not the case.
“It was the ultimate collaboration between me and the visual effects team,” she explains. “If they were to ever release the behind the scenes footage, it’d be me on my tiptoes flying around this studio, pretending to fly.”
So when Alexander Molony and Ever Anderson, who play Peter and Wendy, respectively, filmed scenes “with Tinkerbell,” they had to stretch their imagination. “We just had a a glowing ball,” Molony tells POPSUGAR.
Anderson explains, “It was a blue stick so that you could edit it out and a tiny little light bulb on the tip. So that was how we got used to seeing Tinkerbell for the longest time.” They didn’t actually meet Shahidi until they started doing press together.
But the duo did get to fly around in harnesses and pretend to fly, and they say it was “a lot of fun,” but also hard work. “We had a lot of training so that we could build the muscles and really get into balancing ourselves in the wire rigs,” Anderson explains. “It was great fun, but more often than not, you’d have to take like a hot bath afterwards because you’d find yourself really bruised from the harness.”
There have been dozens of Peter Pan adaptations through the years, including this new live-action version from Disney, and Anderson reveals that another actor who once played Wendy Darling sent her a message when “Peter Pan & Wendy”‘s trailer dropped: Rachel Hurd-Wood, who starred in 2003’s “Peter Pan.” “She actually reached out to me and I was so excited because she’s lovely,” Anderson recalls.
Watch the video above to see what else Shahidi, Anderson, and Molony had to say about the film — and to see how well they did on our Peter Pan quiz!
“Peter Pan & Wendy” is streaming now on Disney+.
