RADIO TIMES – Cinderella’s grand entrance at the Prince’s ball is one of the crowning moments in the much-loved fairytale – and in Kenneth Branagh’s live-action Disney remake. But when the day finally came to film it, leading lady Lily James “wasn’t really sure what was going on.”
“I was really sick,” she told RadioTimes.com. “Actors rarely do it but I had to take two days off.”
“There was this section of the film where it rains and I get wet and so I spent days on end just being hosed down. It was winter and I just got really sick,” she explains.
So rather than it being a career highlight, the ball was “all a bit hazy… I wasn’t really sure what was going on.”
It wasn’t all bad, though. Her illness “added to this delirium” and the magic of the moment, she says.
“Sometimes you get a little bit spacey when you’ve had too much Night Nurse,” laughed director Kenneth Branagh when we asked him about James’ delirious performance later on. “But it was perfect timing. It was a good thing for her, coming in and knocking on that door. She hadn’t known what we had been doing for two days with a thousand people in there. It was lovely.”
And there was no way his leading lady was going to miss out, ill or not.
“Lily got flu at the beginning of that sequence so she was late to the ball. It wasn’t until the evening of the second day that I said ‘Look Lily, we can still keep going but we really are waiting for you now so tomorrow by the end of the day I’m going to have to do a big wide shot and have the double come in in the dress. She said, ‘Stop right there. I’ll be in first thing’.”
“She came in, nose-streaming, but nobody else was getting into that dress!” he said.
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