Cher shares her fear of joining the dancing queens in Mamma Mia! 2

The cast were delighted to return for another Abbainspired musical, finds Laura Harding

Pierce Brosnan is a very good son. During the filming of the hotly anticipated Mamma Mia! sequel, he had a day off so decided to take his mum out to lunch.

But as fate would have it, his phone rang to call him to set.

“I said to her, ‘Well, Mum, you may as well come with me, we’ll go to work’ and we went down to the studio.’

“I had no idea why I was being called in, just to be part of the ensemble, I guessed. “And there was Cher. “Everyone was there with their mothers and fathers and boyfriends and girlfriends – all watching her do her thing.”

The singing superstar is the newest and starriest addition to the cast as we return to the island of Kalokairi for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, 10 years after the first film was a box-office juggernaut.

Cher plays Ruby, the mother of Meryl Streep’s character Donna Sheridan and appears in the film alongside returning stars Brosnan, Dame Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, Amanda Seyfried and Colin Firth.

“My mum sat there with Meryl and Christine and Julie and she was in heaven,” Brosnan, 65, remembers.

“It was a glorious day, a fabulous day. It was five takes with 300 people there, seven cameras.”

Baranski, who returns as Tanya, laughs at the memory. “We were all watching, because she really is a rock chick. She’s the real deal.

“Meryl turned to me at one point and said, ‘So this is how it’s really done’.

“But if anything she was rather shy about it and intimidated.”

Indeed Cher herself admits she was petrified on her first day on set.

“I was terrified,” the 72-yearold confesses.

“Everyone had been together and my character wasn’t very liked so I was nervous, but everyone was nice to me.

“Meryl was behind a piece of scenery watching me do my number and that made me feel good after the fact but it was hard to go on a set

0 Cher as Ruby Sheridan in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

where you were a stranger to everyone.

“I knew some of the people, but I am doing this ‘mean grandmother’ thing.

“But in the end, I felt really loved and kind of like a great grandmother.”

Indeed nobody loved her more than Seyfried, 32, who returns as Donna’s daughter Sophie, and burst into tears when she found out Cher would be playing her grandmother.

“Now it’s like, ‘Why was she not in Mamma Mia 1?’”

But even without Cher, it’s hard to comprehend the success of that first Mamma Mia film in the UK, where it made almost £70 million.

When it was released in 2008, during the depths of the credit crunch, it became the highest grossing film of all time at the British box office.

While it has since been usurped by a number of bigbudget blockbusters which have pushed it down the rankings, it is still the most successful musical.

But despite that success, the cast were not optimistic they would get a chance to reunite.

“We had all but given up,” Baranski, 66, says. “Not that we were just waiting by the phone for 10 years, but we had so much fun the first time that we hoped that we could

all just be together for the pleasure of the experience again.

“So when I heard everybody had agreed to do it, I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, how fabulous will this be?’”

But for Seyfried, who had just given birth to her first child with husband Thomas Sadoski, she was caught unaware when she got the call.

“I was not mentally prepared for it at all. But then I read the script and I was like, ‘I could totally be mentally prepared very soon for this’.”

In fact it ended up being serendipitous, because the movie is so much about motherhood, and the relationships between mothers and daughters.

“That’s why the timing was so perfect in the grand scheme of things,” she says.

“I related to Sophie differently and it’s so amazing that when I first saw the cut of the musical number I’ve Been Waiting For You, I was just floored because I know how much that meant to me because I am having a moment with my unborn child, as Sophie.

“It is cut together with Lily as Donna having Sophie and that relationship to this baby is blossoming on the screen and everything about that just runs so deep.

“It means so much more than it could have possibly had I not had a child.”

“Meryl was behind a piece of scenery watching me do my number and that made me feel good”

● Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is released in UK cinemas tomorrow.