Everyone's childhood-favourite nanny is returning to the big screen this Christmas, bringing along with it all the joy and nostalgia of any Disney classic; 'Mary Poppins Returns' will premier in only a few short weeks on December 19th, and, like everyone, we are counting down the days until we can see Emily Blunt's exciting new interpretation of this legendary role. The sequel is set 30 years after the original 'Mary Poppins' film, when Jane and Michael (now played by Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw) are grown up and have families of their own. Mary Poppins returns to the Banks family in order to help them to re-discover the magic of life once again. With heartwarming nods to the original film (which are plainly evident in the trailer alone), this sequel promises to pay homage to the classic and maintain that nostalgia, all while transporting us to a new, exciting age of adventures with the magical nanny.
In anticipation for the release of Rob Marshall's 'Mary Poppins Returns, we had the amazing opportunity to speak to Emily Mortimer, starring in the role of Jane, about her thoughts about the sequel, declaring that "everything is all brilliantly true to the first movie, but while having a character of it's own."
Movie'n'Co: Why do you think 'Mary Poppins' is still such a family favourite, even nearly 60 years after the original film?
Emily Mortimer: It captures something in all of our fantasies about this kind of magical parent figure that isn't our parents but is somehow better than our parents. Because, after all, all of our parents are pretty flawed, but the magical person flying in on an umbrella [is not]; she is very strict but also incredibly loving and gives us the most amazing access to our imagination and takes us on magical adventures and teaches us how to live life fully, and is always there for us and never absent from us... I think that there is just something about that character that captures our fantasies as human beings.
That character exists in literature and movies and things everywhere; as kind of a Merlin character or a Willy Wonka or Pied Piper. You know there's this sort of child wranglers who are these magical, slightly foreboding, but yet full of love and excitement. It's a big theme in the literally canon I would say. So I think that's partly why.
And as well, it's a huge part of all of our childhoods. It was my mother's [...] and then it was my childhood, and it was my own kids' childhood, who are now 15 and 16. They watched that film from when they were about three years old on.
Movie'n'Co: Jane and Michael's mother was an active member of the suffragettes movement and in the trailer Jane is seen holding protest signs. Does she follow in her mother's footsteps in someway?
E.M.: Yes, she's a bit of an activist, yes. She's not so much a suffragette, but she's a woman who works for the poor and dispossessed and does soup kitchens and that kind of thing. London at the time was going through a depression between the wars, as all of England was, just as most of Europe and America was too, and there was massive unemployment and poverty. Jane follows in her mother's footsteps as a bit of an activist, fighting for the poor and the needy.
I was doing some research in the run-up to the movie and I discovered that they had also introduced a law after the first world war; there was terrible unemployment and all these guys were coming back from having fought in the trenches and needed to be employed, so any women that had jobs were forced to give them up. They introduced a thing called the Marriage Law, where you couldn't actually legally have a job or be employed and be married at the same time [as a woman]. Literally you had to choose between having a marriage and a family life and a career. I thought that was very interesting, so it is kind of a big deal to be a working woman at the time, especially someone who is fighting for the poor. So she's a bit of a free spirit, like her mother.
There is a brilliant line in the first movie that is in the mother's song, that Glynis John sings so brilliantly about the suffragettes. It goes something like: "though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid".
Movie'n'Co: How did you prepare for the role of Jane as an adult? Did it come from watching her as a child in the film or reading the books?
E.M.: I really just focused on the parents in the first movie. As an actress you're always trying to come up with a backstory about who your parents were and how you were brought up and what you were like as a child. It was very daunting taking on this role, in some ways, because she's so familiar to everyone in the world. But in other ways it was a gift to have that movie there already, and to have "my parents" living and breathing, to look at and study. Rather than study the child (Karen Dotrice in the original movie) I went under the assumption that we basically all turn into our mothers. I studied the parents... because they're quite eccentric characters, and they're brilliant. I love them.
I'd already read the books to my kids, but I looked at them and thought very hard about what it would be like to be the child of those two people and how she would grow up.
The set up of the film is a lot darker than the original, set in the Great Depression, at the brink of a world war and within a grieving family. Is that relevant to the way in which the film is told?
E.M.: I think it's very important because the whole message of the movie is how important it is to keep the imagination alive, the child's imagination alive, to not lose that. Because that's what keeps you going even through dark times, this ability to transport yourself with your imagination, and to feel love and joy and life even in the darkest of times. I think at that moment in time that was something that was very much needed, and obviously in our own times it is something that is very much needed.
Movie'n'Co: Instead of remaking the original film, like Disney so often does nowadays, they chose to make a sequel. Why do you think that is?
E.M.:It was always done in a completely uncynical way, because that was Rob's vision. It was not to just recreate the first movie to make money, it was about why do we need this movie now? It is still part of the first one and born out of it, but also there are books! There is more than one book and Mary Poppins was always part of a series of adventures, rather than a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. She was always coming and going from their lives. There was a lot to draw on from the original source material, which is what he did. He went back to the books, rather than focusing on the movie.
Movie'n'Co: How does the film maintain the feeling of nostalgia without feeling old and repetitive?
E.M.: Well it's a completely different story but there are so many nods and winks, there's so much homage paid to the first movie. In every breath of the second movie you can feel the first one. What [Rob] did brilliantly was he got Sandy Powell, who did the costumes, Marc [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman], who did the music and the score and wrote all the lyrics, and Peter King, who did the hair and makeup. These are all genius people at the top of their game, who knew how to make reference to the first movie, and make it part of the second movie in a very important way, but also make it different and something that stands out.
Emily [Blunt], in her performance, does that beautifully. There is something very much of Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins in her, but she's also very much a completely different person as well. In a way, she's closer to the character in the book; a bit more forbidding, and full of sass and sex-appeal... and love and warmth ultimately. Everything is all brilliantly true to the first movie, but while having a character of it's own.
Movie'n'Co: As well as with Emily Blunt's Mary Poppins, in what other ways does 'Mary Poppins Returns' pay tribute to Travers' novels?
E.M.: There are more adventures that are inspired by the books. Adventures that Mary Poppins and the children go on in the movie are inspired by adventures in the books that aren't in the original movie. They used the books as a template in a way, more than they used the original movie. Although the original movie is still a part of it; there are refrains in the music from the original movie, there are these animation sequences that pay homage to the original movie. As I've said, it's in every breath of the sequel, but the books are there too and they were referenced a great deal in the research and preparation for the movie.
Movie'n'Co: Why do you feel that this 'Mary Poppins' film important?
E.M.: When went to meet [Rob Marshall] I got told I was going to meet him for 'Mary Poppins' but I didn't know what was the part or what was the deal, I didn't really have many thoughts about it. And I emerged about an hour later, having spoken to John DeLuca, his partner and producer... I thought it was totally inspired. I wrung up my agent as said, "I have to be in this movie, I just have to be part of this." It was the way that Rob talked about exactly what we were just saying, about why he felt it was so important to tell this story now. He wasn't remaking it, he was doing it 30 years on to see the children grown up and how life has kind of battered them. They need another dose of that magic that Mary Poppins brought into their lives, just as we all do, as we get sort of middle-aged, also in the way that society does, it needs a dose of hope and optimism and imagination. We need to stop being told to be scared and afraid; we need to buck up and be full of curiosity and love. It really genuinely inspired me.
'Mary Poppins Returns' will be released in cinemas in the UK on 19th December 2018.
