Why Returning To Zootopia Still Feels Like Magic For Ginnifer Goodwin
“I still can't believe that I got the job the first time 10 years ago,” Ginnifer Goodwin said about voicing Judy Hopps in Disney’s hit film Zootopia. She plays the first ever bunny cop who is often underestimated, but pushes through with a fierce optimism and determination. Now Judy reunites with her fox partner Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) to tackle an even bigger mystery in the big city for Zootopia 2. Speaking with Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado in a roundtable, Goodwin talks about returning to the role that she called “the most creatively fulfilling experience of my life.”
The first Zootopia was a unique project for Goodwin in that they wanted her to just be her most authentic self. “I'm really a technical actress. I'm academic about everything. I'm research based, technique based. I didn't really know what to do when, on number one, it was explained to me that I was to show up and not act. I was to be present and authentic and go on the ride and we would see what happens and they would write to it and animate it. If the scene goes off in this direction, we might be plumbing the depths of despair or it might suddenly be hysterical. We were to just follow wherever the feelings were taking us,” she told me. “I didn't know what to do with that because I've always played other people and other characters and I was suddenly being told like, ‘No, you're enough. So just be.’”
It may be a decade since she first voiced Judy Hopps, but Goodwin found direction in listening back to the first film. “I actually listened to number one over and over and over and over again because I found that I got a lot as a […] voice actress. I got a lot from listening and figuring out what it was that my co-stars did. What could I steal from them and learn from them?” she shared. “But also I could figure out what Disney had done in choosing takes to create patterns and those patterns then create the character. So I knew, okay, they like that thing. I'm going to do more of that thing. Then I also found an opportunity to create new patterns based on that. It's like being in a sandbox. It's like being in theater school again.”
While she typically creates road maps of things to hit for the live-action characters she has portrayed, she didn’t have to do that with Judy. “What I'm taught in this experience is you can do no wrong. There is no such thing as coming in and expressing yourself in a way that is out of character, that is not Judy, because you are Judy. We're taking what we can of your soul and trying to somehow bottle it and put it in this creature that's also a lot cooler than I am and has a lot more integrity,” explained Goodwin. “So though our qualities are different in a lot of ways, they're still trying to take whatever it is that we sense about each other that makes us alive and they're trying to put that on a flat screen, which is nuts. Somehow they're able to do it. But I feel like the challenge for me is to show up and be present and real and listen and respond and not put up a guard.”
Goodwin revealed that, while there was talk of picking up the story years later, the filmmakers felt it was “cheating the audience out of experiencing growth and chance in real time” to do that. “Disney goes for it. They held nothing back here. I really feel I'm not even sure what direction this is going at this point because I feel like they're really letting the flaws of these characters all hang out,” she shared. “Ultimately on top of there being this universal theme about our valuing the differences in each other and the responsibility we have to our communities and our societies to value those differences, [you get] to understand that we can't put a puzzle together if all of the pieces are the same shape. We need all the shapes to make the pretty picture. It really is still a movie about the dynamic between these two characters. We all have this dynamic in our life somewhere. I feel like it's such a gift that we can like step out of it and look at it and analyze it in the safety of it being like this rabbit and this fox learning to navigate this partnership.”
Goodwin is so “grateful” for the people who went to the movie theater to see Zootopia 2, which has brought in over $1.27 billion at the box office. “I love being in a dark room full of strangers laughing together and gasping together and crying together,” she said. “I feel like the themes of the movie are paralleled in the very theater where I'm sitting having this experience with my children going like, ‘We're all different and we know nothing about each other, but we're all in it together.’ Like it's all magic.”
In fact, her 11-year-old son is sure that Zootopia 2 is a masterpiece. “Even though they're Disney nuts, they won't watch Once Upon A Time, which I don't understand because it's their father and me. It makes no sense to me, but I think they're just not comfortable seeing us on screen. Zootopia they love. They had seen it a million times,” laughed Goodwin. “At the end of the movie, he turned to me and, with more sincerity than I think I've ever seen from him, he said, ‘That is the best movie I have ever seen.’”
Playing Judy is very special for Goodwin, who finds magic every time she steps into the booth to bring the character to life. “I would like to say that in all of the roles I feel like I'm really there and in the world and that the magic is happening, but I don't. I feel like I seek out that experience on a live-action set and I just pray that at one point on a project I'll feel like something really happened and magic really existed for a moment. I feel that every day I'm in the sound booth for Zootopia.”
Zootopia 2 is playing in theaters now.
