Josh Gad says children were 'sobbing, screaming, and fully traumatized' by Olaf's original “Frozen 2 ”death scene

You can thank Josh Gad for sparing a generation of children deep emotional scars.

In his new memoir In Gad We Trust, released Jan. 14, the actor says his character Olaf's death in the original Frozen 2 screenplay was so "brutal" that writer-director Jennifer Lee was forced to rewrite it.

"Jenn and I started recording the dialogue and I couldn't get through it without sobbing. Those first recordings were brutal, and I remember feeling that we were doing something that was going to pack a serious punch," Gad recalls in the new book.

After Gad, Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, and the rest of the Frozen 2 cast wrapped their takes, the actor "asked Jenn how the first test screening went. Jenn is many incredible things, but a good liar is not one of them. She put on a brave face and said, 'The adults loved it, but the kids were very confused and very, very sad.'" That's when he "knew we still had a long road ahead."

Related: How to chase a storm: The cast and creators of Frozen 2 on making powerful art under pressure

The first Frozen film premiered in 2013 to uproarious critical and commercial success. The frost-bitten tale of two sisters mending their fractured relationship grossed $1.28 billion on a $150 million budget and earned some of the most unqualified raves since the Disney "renaissance" of the 1990s. That set expectations high for the 2019 sequel, but according to Gad, "during the very early days of the film, none of us knew what the hell the movie was about."

"The creatives do a very good job of keeping everything under lock and key and only giving us what they think we need to execute our roles," Gad explains. So imagine his surprise when he discovered "the first scene I ever recorded for the film" would be the death of his character Olaf, the loyal, child-like snowman companion to Bell's Anna.

"I got to the studio and Jenn slow-rolled me into the day's material. As I looked at the scene, the first thing I saw was 'Olaf begins to flurry away.' I read further. 'Anna sobs' and 'Olaf looks to her for help.' I looked at Jenn. 'Wait — are we...?' With tears in her eyes, she nodded her head and said, 'Yes.'"

Related: Josh Gad regrets using his own voice in Frozen because he was freaking kids out at the grocery store

Gad describes the scene as originally written in which Olaf slowly decorporealizes in the wind as "brutal."

"By the end of the recording, there wasn't a dry eye in the room. I remember getting a FaceTime call from my wife during the session and her response to seeing my puffy and red eyes was 'Jesus, what the hell are they doing to you over there?' She couldn't tell if we were recording a sequel to Frozen or Sophie's Choice," Gad jokes.

Neither could test audiences for the original cut of the film, apparently. As Gad notes, "one of the major issues was that Olaf's death scene was causing absolute havoc with the younger viewers. They were apparently sobbing, screaming, and fully traumatized by the extended sequence and the tone of the scene."

Related: New Olaf short film for Disney+ will tell 'the untold origins' of Frozen snowman

What proved too much for the core demographic was that "in the first version, Olaf himself was scared and confused by what was happening." Though Gad calls the original scene "truly stunning," he postulates that "in its commitment to the brutality of Olaf's naïveté about all things, including dying, we had made our intended audience scared for Olaf, rather than emotional."

Gad quotes then Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger (via Lee) as summing it up this way: "Olaf is a child. You can't just willy-nilly kill a scared child, because the children watching will see themselves in him."

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Ultimately, Lee "fought to do an altered version in which Olaf isn't scared, but instead is at peace and comforts Anna before he leaves. It was one of the lightbulb moments and creatively brilliant pivots that Jenn and the Frozen team are known for at this point."

That's the scene that made it into the film. "I'm flurrying away, the magic is fading," Gad intones in his innocent Olaf voice in the scene, which depicts delicate snowflakes beginning to radiate out from the dying snowman. "Come here, I've got you," Anna says, swooping Olaf into her lap. Before he flurries away, Olaf tells Anna that he "thought of one thing that's permanent — love."

The scene is truly heartbreaking, but Elsa (Menzel) revives Olaf only minutes later, and the merry snowman gets the last laugh in the film's charming end-credits scene. But none of it would have landed had Gad, Lee, and the rest of the Frozen 2 creative team stuck with the morose original cut.

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