The Ultimate Guide to Aladdin Read online

  The Ultimate Guide to Aladdin

  CONTENTS

  Tale as Old as Time

  The enduring power of Aladdin

  A World of Wonders

  Inside the brand-new live-action movie

  It’s Wish-Craft

  Meet Aladdin—and his new Genie

  Behind the Scenes

  Detailed photos from the set

  Meet the Cast

  Aladdin’s stars on making a family film for a new generation

  Welcome to Agrabah

  Exploring behind the scenes of the live action film’s sets

  Arabian Sights

  The concept art that captures a whole new world

  Secrets of the Set

  Production designer Gemma Jackson shares her inspirations

  Fancy Dress

  Costume designer Michael Wilkinson clad the actors in vibrant colors

  Conjuring Genie

  It’s not easy being . . . blue? All about Will Smith’s look

  Creature Feature

  From talking parrots to pet tigers, the production brought a menagerie to life

  All That Glitters

  Inside Genie’s lamp

  Change of Tune

  The new songwriters give Jasmine a voice

  The Legend of Aladdin

  The story of the 1992 favorite

  Animating Aladdin

  The key creative voices look back at the groundbreaking animated movie

  Remembering Robin Williams

  Genie’s supervising animator speaks

  The Music Man

  Alan Menken talks about Howard Ashman, Tim Rice and their soundtrack

  Stage Magic

  Aladdin hits Broadway

  Foreword

  TALE AS OLD AS TIME

  FANTASY! WISH FULFILLMENT! FLYING AREA RUGS! WHY AN ANCIENT FABLE CAN STILL MAKE TODAY’S AUDIENCES ALADDIN INSANE. By Steve Daly

  An early-1900s illustration of Aladdin and the afreet (genie).

  STORYTELLERS HAVE BEEN SPINNING FABLES about wish fulfillment for centuries. But in our current anxious age of seemingly bottomless bad news, we’re especially hungry for these fantasies. It’s self-medication. It’s distraction. And no one knew the life-giving power of an engrossing narrative better than Scheherazade, the wily heroine of The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Arabian folktales from which Aladdin hails. Aware that the evil sultan she weds plans to kill her after one night of marriage, Scheherazade tells him a story, leaving the cliff-hanger ending for the following evening, piquing the sultan’s curiosity and thus saving her skin. She spun a lot of famous yarns—“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Sinbad the Sailor” among them. But it is “Aladdin” that inspires the most wonder.

  The story’s been told many ways, but we know it as basically this: A street urchin wins the love of a princess thanks to the help of a powerful, wish-granting genie. Who among us can’t identify with wanting to supersize our dreams? We wish we were rich. (Not tacky rich, just comfortable.) We wish we lived in a palace—but without drafts or medieval plumbing. We wish we could marry a handsome prince or a beautiful princess—who, you know, really gets us. Oh, and world peace too. What? Already used up three wishes? Perhaps it’s not so simple after all.

  That may be what makes the real star of the story, Genie, an enduring character. Wish, he says, but be careful what you wish for. Disney saw the potential here, pairing folklore’s ultimate wish granter with the mighty, whirring comic mind of Robin Williams and adding songs from the team that had made The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast sing. Poof! The 1992 animated musical became a hit for the ages.

  Now Disney—and director Guy Ritchie, best known for the Sherlock Holmes films—is giving Aladdin the live-action treatment, and we’re once again flying over the alleys of Agrabah on a magic carpet. When that lamp is uncorked and the smoke clears, it is Will Smith in command of Genie’s powers. Twitter tittered when they first saw him with blue skin and rocking a high ponytail. (Couldn’t you hear his Agent J voice countering, “I make this look good . . . ”?) But, just as Robin Williams threw off generations of Genie conventions, Smith won’t simply be imitating the beloved late comedian’s indelible take. The actor-musician has promised a hip-hop flavor to the role. And why not? This time the mythical kingdom where the story is set has been reimagined as a Silk Road fusion of not just Middle Eastern customs, names and architecture but South Asian cultural references too. We’re still hungry to see new splendors and new lands in a world where every place seems already discovered, and to do it in ways that celebrate and expand possibilities.

  No wonder the pulse pounds at the prospect of another Aladdin adventure. The familiar Ashman-Menken-Rice songs are there, but this is a whole new world. There are fresh, additional melodies to be hummed, luxurious raiments to be ogled and a few new characters, including a female pal for Princess Jasmine. (Think of it: A story that sprang from a wife’s trying to save herself from death might in 2019 pass the Bechdel test!) EW has the most comprehensive look at this new movie: its cast, its creators and the magic it took to make it. Also inside is a fresh telling of how the animated classic came together. So turn the page, and let’s begin a tour down the rollicking road that leads to a happy ending.

  Robin Williams lent his voice and warmth to Genie in the animated 1992 film.

  Now Will Smith (far right) takes on the role of Genie, with Mena Massoud as Aladdin.

  A World of Wonders

  INSIDE THE BRAND-NEW LIVE-ACTION MOVIE

  Inside Look

  IT’S... WISH CRAFT

  DISNEY’S LIVE-ACTION ALADDIN ENCHANTS WITH ITS MODERN SENSIBILITY, SUMPTUOUS VISUALS, TALENTED CAST—AND WILL SMITH WORKING BLUE. By Piya Sinha-Roy

  Life swiftly changes for street urchin Aladdin (Mena Massoud) after releasing Genie (Will Smith) from his lamp.

  A DISNEY MUSICAL ABOUT A STREET URCHIN who befriends a genie and falls in love with a princess isn’t a premise that comes to mind when one thinks of Guy Ritchie. The British director, 50, is known for gritty thrillers featuring robberies, explosions and car chases, such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. But switch a car for a magic carpet, replace stolen money with a stolen lamp, throw in an underdog hero, and you can start to see why Ritchie felt that reconceiving Aladdin for live-action might be in his wheelhouse when the studio approached him in 2016.

  “My skills and experience could add enough to make it feel fresh and worth it but not so much so that it would wash away nostalgia,” Ritchie tells EW. He adds that because he has five children, “making a kids’ film was very appealing to me.”

  And the first Aladdin proved to be much more than a kids’ movie. Disney’s flight through a fictional Middle Eastern realm, woven with wanderlust and magic and loosely inspired by Arabian folktales, ascended to the top of the 1992 box office. On the heels of 1989’s The Little Mermaid and 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, and with soaring songs like “A Whole New World” and “Friend Like Me,” Aladdin helped cement Disney’s modern animation reign.

  When Disney began ramping up production of live-action remakes of its animated hits, Aladdin was green-lit with Ritchie at the helm. But before he could tell the story, Ritchie had three wishes.

  Wish 1

  THE GENIE

  Agrabah’s crowded bazaar serves as the initial meeting place for the two lovebirds.

  From the get-go Ritchie faced one big—and blue—issue. Along with the titular hero, the story is centered on a genie, a wondrous blue immortal trapped in a lamp, who grants three wishes to whoever releases him from his vessel. In the animated version, Robin Williams breathed life into the fast-ta
lking wish-maker, turning him into the heartwarming and critically lauded comedic core of the film. Williams’s untimely death in 2014 made reimagining Genie onscreen a significant burden, and one that Ritchie knew he had to crack.

  “The great thing about the role of the genie is that it’s essentially a hyperbole for who that individual actor is, so it’s a wonderful platform and tapestry for an actor to fill his boots on,” Ritchie says. So in stepped one of the funniest forces in entertainment: Will Smith.

  “Whenever you’re doing things that are iconic, it’s always terrifying,” Smith tells EW with his booming laugh. “The question is always: Where was there meat left on the bone? Robin didn’t leave a lot of meat on the bone with the character.”

  But if Williams “infused the character with a timeless version of himself,” Smith says, then the 50-year-old actor was going to do the same. “I started to feel confident that I could deliver something that was an homage to Robin Williams but was musically different,” he says. “Just the flavor of the character would be different enough and unique enough that it would be in a different lane versus trying to compete.” The superstar—who recorded his own version of “Friend Like Me” on the first day he met with the music team—says he tapped into his roster of roles from the 1990s (including Independence Day, Bad Boys and a certain Bel-Air prince from West Philadelphia) to shape his Genie, weaving enough of a flair for fashion into the character to earn the praise of one Disney executive, who described Smith’s Genie as part Fresh Prince, part Hitch.

  “I think it’ll stand out as unique even in the Disney world,” Smith says. “There hasn’t been a lot of that hip-hop flavor in Disney history.”

  Genie (here in his blue form, where he is visible only to his master) greets Aladdin.

  Aladdin displaying his sleight of hand in the marketplace.

  Wish 2

  THE LOVERS

  Aladdin and Jasmine (Naomi Scott) continue their romance.

  Time was running out for Ritchie as the start of production loomed and the Internet caught wind of the challenge to find his two leads: the affable, quick-thinking, optimistic dreamer Aladdin and the indomitable, independent, benevolent Princess Jasmine. Ritchie confirms that the search was long, but after hundreds of auditions over six months, the roles went to 27-year-old Canadian actor Mena Massoud, who stars on Amazon Prime Video’s Jack Ryan series, and British actress Naomi Scott, 26, known for Power Rangers and the upcoming Charlie’s Angels reboot.

  Massoud jetted off to the England set to learn how to properly sing and dance, as well as perform stunts for the film such as riding a camel and scuba diving (when Aladdin gets thrown off a cliff). “The singing and dancing I had to really train and put in time for, as I’m predominantly an actor first,” Massoud says. Ritchie calls him “quite a funny lad” and says the actor quickly bonded with Smith offscreen, as the duo captured the brotherly back-and-forth that Aladdin and Genie share. “What was nice about Will was that the more I got to know him and the more I spent time with him, the stronger naturally our relationships became with our characters,” Massoud explains.

  Scott, whose mother is of Indian descent and whose father is British, had found herself instantly drawn as a child to 1992’s dark-eyed, dark-haired, olive-skinned Jasmine. “Having a Disney princess that looked something like me, I think was really powerful,” says Scott. More than 25 years later, she says she was excited to spin her own twist on a Disney princess: “Jasmine’s main objective at the beginning is to really protect her people and to do right by them. She definitely isn’t a finished article at the beginning of the movie, but she has this beautiful arc and progression. She goes from asking for what she wants to just taking it and displaying that she is a leader.”

  Scott’s Jasmine builds on the DNA of the animated iteration, who has long been celebrated for having a feminist point of view as she fought against being married off to just any prince, per the rules of Agrabah. The film has been revamped to reflect present-day ideals that make her “a more rounded character and maybe not being such a stereotype of the time,” Ritchie says. Jasmine also gets a solo song, one of the new numbers that composer Alan Menken has written (with lyrics from La La Land songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) to accompany his original tunes. And this time Jasmine has a female counterpart to bounce her ideas and dreams off of, not just her pet tiger Rajah.

  Saturday Night Live alum Nasim Pedrad plays the newly created role of Dalia, Jasmine’s handmaiden and friend, who helps Jasmine navigate the suitors attempting to win her hand (like actor Billy Magnussen in another new role, Prince Anders of Skånland). “Jasmine is so resilient and independent in this version, she’s focused on things other than which boy she’s going to end up with,” Pedrad says. “She really wants to be a leader, and Dalia really supports that but at the same time wants to make sure she doesn’t get in trouble.”

  The street rat and the princess flee from palace guards through a tannery.

  Prince Ali’s parade storms the streets of Agrabah.

  Princess Jasmine inside the sultan’s palace.

  Thanks to the powers of Genie, Prince Ali rides in a parade.

  Wish 3

  THE KINGDOM

  Nasim Pedrad (left) plays the new role of Dalia, handmaiden and best friend to Jasmine.

  As Ritchie and his team considered Morocco for location shooting, they realized it might actually hinder them from creating the fictional Agrabah. “I think I was freer to pull things from where I wanted them, I didn’t just have to be Moroccan,” production designer Gemma Jackson tells EW. Jackson and her team instead built a set—about the size of two football fields—in southeast England, transforming the rain-soaked Surrey vista into a vibrant, dusty, millennia-old bustling port city.

  Finding Agrabah was the first hurdle; filling it was the second. Both Disney and Ritchie had to tackle how to update Aladdin and its cast to avoid the cultural inaccuracies and insensitivities that the 1992 animated version fell into, such as depicting the street-market sellers of Agrabah as greedy and grotesque or describing Arabia (in song lyrics) as a place “where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” (the song “Arabian Nights” was edited in later releases to remove this line).

  Massoud says the film’s ensemble does represent the diversity of the Middle Eastern and South Asian worlds, pointing out that he’s Egyptian-Canadian; Scott is Caucasian-Indian; Pedrad is Iranian-American; and actor Marwan Kenzari, who plays Jafar (the villainous Royal Vizier, who seeks the lamp for his own nefarious gain), is Dutch and of Tunisian descent. “I’m really proud to be in a film that represents so many visible and ethnically different cultures,” says Massoud.

  Ritchie says the live-action film has a “slightly broader world, a hybrid world” that would include a Middle Eastern and South Asian crowd onscreen—some 500 extras of diverse backgrounds filled Agrabah. Meanwhile Jackson drew inspiration from Moroccan, Persian and Turkish cultures, Victorian paintings and Iznik ceramics to conjure the setting. Ritchie was also assisted by “an army of cultural advisers” on-set, adding that the film, while steeped in this Arabian world, is what he calls “principally a human challenge rather than an ethnic one.”

  “The challenges that the individual has to transcend are the same for any ethnicity or culture,” Ritchie says. He adds, “I’m loath to shine a light on culture or color or ethnicity, because I feel as though that’s shining a light on the wrong part of the stage. The question should be, how sensitive are you toward humans?”

  Jackson’s evolving set was a playground for Ritchie to film musical numbers, parades and fast, choppy chase scenes where Aladdin is pursued by the Sultan’s guards through narrow alleys and along clustered rooftops, traversing tanneries and ducking through market stalls. “It’s like Old Hollywood and what making big movies was like in the 1950s,” Ritchie says of the physical sets.

  “When you think timeless Disney classic, you’re not really thinking Guy Ritchie,” Smith says. “But he brings a bea
utiful edge to the look and feel and imagining of Aladdin.”

  Wishes granted.

  Marwan Kenzari as Machiavellian sorcerer Jafar, flanked by two palace guards.

  Aladdin shields two children in the streets of Agrabah.

  On-Set

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  THE CREW KEPT AGRABAH’S BAZAAR COLORFUL AND INCLUDED AUTHENTIC SET DECORATIONS. By Alyssa Smith

  A Study in Scarlet (and Orange and Pink)

  The extensive Agrabah sets were built in London’s suburbs. For a sequence in which palace guards chase Aladdin and Jasmine, the actors ran through the marketplace set past stalls selling food and carpets, down narrow alleys, and wound through this colorful tannery.

  Director’s Cut

  Director Guy Ritchie (far right) consults with Naomi Scott (Jasmine, far left) and Mena Massoud (Aladdin). Their fortuitous meeting in the bazaar sparks the romance that drives Aladdin’s plot.

  Import-Export

  While in Marrakech, Jones took lots of reference photographs. Once the stalls were built for Agrabah’s marketplace, she stocked the set with authentic items. “[We] imported directly from countries like Morocco and India and Afghanistan,” Jones says.

  Cornering the Market

  Set decorator Tina Jones visited a Moroccan bazaar in Marrakech for inspiration. Additionally she looked to Victorian paintings and found ideas that felt timeless. “A lot of the street sellers selling rugs and fabrics and brassware are still around today,” she says.