EXCLUSIVE: The Little Mermaid's Melissa McCarthy and Halle Bailey reveal behind-the-scenes secrets about the movie to Yahoo Lifestyle.

Video transcript

- [? Congratulations ?] on the film, guys. It was amazing. I think it was the best live action remake that we've had so far.

HALLE BAILEY: Thank you.

MELISSA MCCARTHY: Wow. Thank you.

- I'm sure that the filmmaking process was quite interesting, given all the underwater scenes. What was that like? And can you give fans a bit of maybe something a little interesting from behind the scenes with that?

MELISSA MCCARTHY: God, there's a lot to unpack there.

HALLE BAILEY: Yeah.

MELISSA MCCARTHY: There's so-- it's technically almost like an impossible movie, truly. Like and just what they accomplished doesn't make sense, if you actually kind of know how the sausage is made. But at any given time, like, we were always with a team, like, we had stunt people with us at all the-- all different times. Usually we had dancers with us, like, each of my eight tentacles each had its own dancer that they would puppeteer.

And we were on these rigs, and we're 20-- could be 25 feet above the air. And then you're like, well, now I want to swim off. So it's a different rig. And all of a sudden, people would change and then their motor-- like every little piece of it was so complicated. But then in a weird way, it started to just feel really natural because we had so much rehearsal time. That I did think it was funny that, like, we would just be sitting there talking, even like between takes. And we would kind of [INAUDIBLE]--

[LAUGHTER]

And I was like, what are we-- we've all gone crazy.

HALLE BAILEY: That's true.

MELISSA MCCARTHY: We're just kind of like undulating. And you had this team with you which made it so, so fun. I mean, [? this ?] like stunt teams were amazing. And it was-- they were just killing it. There's going to be some behind the scenes stuff that comes out. I don't think anybody's going to be ready to realize like, oh man, this is what's happening at all-- at any given moment. It's really-- it was really fun.

HALLE BAILEY: Yeah.

- Was there a lot of training for you?

HALLE BAILEY: Oh yeah. I mean, there was so much training for me. I went through, like, mermaid training. I worked with these beautiful synchronized swimmers to teach me the gracefulness of Ariel in the water when I actually had to be in the tanks. And then a lot of the stunt training that we had to do because of the blue screen [? where ?] like in the harness and being on wires. So it was so much to think about, but like Melissa said, it was, like, a lot at first. And then it's like, all kind of fades away and it's just simple, and yeah.

- Is it easier to not have tentacles?

[LAUGHTER]

HALLE BAILEY: I think so. I think I'm good with my one tail. I don't know how she was working with eight. That's like amazing.

- And what about when you first saw yourselves in your characters for the first time? Because you both had a bit of a transformation.

MELISSA MCCARTHY: It was wild.

HALLE BAILEY: Yeah. I cried, for sure.

MELISSA MCCARTHY: Yeah. I think I was like, I can't. I needed to, like, take a minute, like we were all like, oh my gosh, it looks amazing. It's so fun. And then there was a moment where I was like, just in my trailer alone. I was like, well, this is weird. Like I'm actually Ursula, and I'm a bit overwhelmed, like it was a bit of a fever dream.

HALLE BAILEY: Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]