Halle Bailey has single-handedly redefined what it means to be — and look like — a princess, an honor the actor doesn’t take lightly. “I remember Ariel was the reason I wanted to swim,” Bailey, who fell in love with the original little mermaid when she was five, told Shine. “When I saw her, [I was] like: ‘She is so beautiful; I want to be a mermaid too.’ She didn’t look like me, but I was okay with that because it was what I was used to at the time.”

The next generation doesn’t have to see things that way, though, and videos of young black girls gleefully reacting to an Ariel they identified with have flooded the internet since Bailey’s casting. “When I saw it [videos] for the first time I just cried,” says Bailey. “I sobbed uncontrollably. The fact that these babies look at me and feel the emotions they feel is a very humbling, beautiful thing.”

Bailey knows how impactful it can be to see yourself on screen, having been moved herself The Princess and the Frog, in which actor and singer Anika Noni Rose plays the titular princess. “I know how much that movie changed my whole perspective on life,” she says. “Wow, it’s possible. Black princesses are possible. We deserve to occupy these spaces as well.”

While the live action Mermaid draws heavily from the original’s plot, there are some significant changes, the most obvious of which are visual. Obviously, changes are necessary when adapting animation to live action, but Bailey and the beauty department also had to reimagine Ariel as a woman of color. Bailey and the team chose to keep her hair red – it was essential – but opted for copper locks to make it her own.

“[Ariel still] has red hair because it’s a very iconic part of her, but I really admired the fact that because I’m a black woman and I have locs, [the producers] wanted to incorporate that into Ariel’s look,” says Bailey. hairdresser Camille Friend was tasked with the transformation which involved dyeing Bailey’s roots red and wrapping her locks in the same shade of hair.