In full Beast mode
> Dan Stevens shares his excitement at playing the iconic character in the upcoming live action version of Disney’s animated classic
What was it that appealed to you about this role? “It’s a huge challenge turning a beloved 2D animated film into a more human 3D story, but it’s a great story with great characters so I was very excited (and my wife and kids were very excited, too).
“I also like that the film is a blend of the real and the virtual. We’ve obviously got some green screen and some CGI, but there’s also a great deal of real going on, too.
“I was in my early teens when the animated film came out and I remember seeing it at the cinema and it being hugely popular, so it was fun for me to think about all the different aspects of the character that I could play with.”
How was it working with director Bill Condon again? “Well, Bill is obviously a master of the big musical extravaganza, so he’s been just great. I had worked with him before ( The Fifth Estate) so I knew his style, and we were able to spend a couple of months going over the script and seeing how we could bring some nuances to the Beast and make him a little more twodimensional and a bit more human.
“We wanted to make him appear like a human trapped inside this creature.”
How does your Beast differ from the Beast in the animated film? “One of the biggest differences is that in the animated film, you don’t see the Beast before he was transformed. You see a stained glass window version of him but there’s no real sense of what he was really like.
“In this film, we see him at the debutantes’ ball, and something that Bill and I were keen to bring out was this sense of a petulant, spoiled child and the sense of entitlement which led to his downfall.
“It was quite fun to do the prologue at the beginning of the film, which was conveyed almost entirely through the
medium of dance, which is not something I’d done much of before. But it allows the audience to see why he was cursed in the first place, which was not just for having refused a rose but for all his other traits as well.”
How was it working with Emma Watson? “She’s great. There’s such a close relationship there, and I was very keen to calibrate the Beast according to the Belle that Emma wanted to be and to play, so we spent a lot of time together just talking about beauty and beastliness, men and women and masculinity and femininity, good and evil and all sorts of polar opposite things.
“We tried to work in some of those things and ultimately realised that the tale is not so much about an ugly thing and a beautiful girl but about the beauty and the beast that’s in all of us and the two sides each person has and learning to live with that balance.
“She’s a very interesting girl and is very intellectually engaged with the fairy tale, and that just makes for a much richer working experience. I hope that helps fuse all of our scenes.”
How was it like shooting the iconic ballroom scene? “It was quite strange actually, because it was one of the first things we shot and people were still getting used to seeing me as the CGI Beast, which is essentially a muscle suit covered in gray Lycra with markers and a skull cap, which doesn’t look very beastly.
“But once we started to waltz, it was quite magical actually. Emma and I had a lot of fun learning that waltz, and it wasn’t easy on stilts.
“But walking onto that ballroom set for the first time was amazing.
“It’s one of the most sensational rooms I’ve ever seen … and then a couple of weeks later it was gone.”