![]() “We studied the first movie again,” Mortimer says. When it came to Mortimer and Whishaw’s characters, the 1964 film became key to bringing Jane and Michael Banks back to the big screen. “You know, I always think about – how do you play James Bond? Sean Connery made him so perfect, so you can’t do what Sean Connery did, you have to find your own way in.” For Blunt, the books allowed her to discover new facets to the character, making her own version of Poppins “a bit more eccentric and frickin’ weird” than her predecessor’s. The actor made a deliberate point of not revisiting the original film, as Marshall adds: “We both realised that you can’t play Julie Andrews, that’s her version of Mary Poppins and she’s iconic and brilliant and will live forever.” Which put the duo in an interesting position. And Emily’s British, so she had everything.” And she needs to be able to sing and dance. You know you have to be a great actress to play all those layers of Mary Poppins – there’s the facade of the stern, proper nanny, but underneath there needs to be a beating heart. “There’s no one else, because the demands of the part are so huge. “There wasn’t even half a second of considering anybody else,” he says. The director had only recently wrapped work on his 2014 musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, starring Blunt, when Mary Poppins Returns dropped in his lap. It’s a performance so perfectly pitched that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. ![]() “When I come here, I feel that.”īlunt’s performance is entirely different in its notes – a little more haughty, and drier in her humour – but with exactly the same effect. “I see London through those eyes,” he says. He also finds the city occasionally touched by an indescribable Poppins-tinged magic, since it was the first film he ever saw, aged four. As it turns out, Rob Marshall, the director of Mary Poppins Returns, shares my sentiment. And how, sometimes, I can still walk through London and that sudden excitement will rush into my veins. Granted, it didn’t turn out quite as I imagined, but it’s ironic how much a Hollywood musical managed to shape my relationship with where I now call home. For me, it was the promise of a whole new world, as a child moving from the US to the UK, believing the country would be all tea parties on ceilings and kite-flying in the park. For some, it’s the feeling of faded innocence, of carefree Sunday afternoons sitting in front of the television. We all have our memories of it, from tap-dancing penguins to bottomless carpet bags, but Mary Poppins has also come to exist as a kind of emotional impression. How do you recapture the feeling of magic? That’s the question the makers of Mary Poppins Returns, the sequel to the 1964 Disney film, had to ask of themselves.
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