Not even the top-tapping tunes of ABBA can unleash the “Dancing Queen” in everyone.
Christine Baranski, who starred in the ABBA-led movie musical “Mamma Mia!” and its 2018 sequel, revealed one of her costars despised the film’s elaborate dance numbers during a May 7 interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Baranski, 73, played Tanya Chesham-Leigh in the 2008 romantic comedy about a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) who schemes to meet her biological father at her wedding by inviting three men from her mother’s past to the ceremony.
The trio of unwitting men — Sam Carmichael, Harry Bright and Bill Anderson — were portrayed by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård, respectively.
The film, which grossed $610 million worldwide, spawned the sequel “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.” And while all three actors were reluctant to show off their dance moves, Skarsgård had the least boogie spirit the second time around, according to Baranski.
“Stellan hated it,” Baranski told host Stephen Colbert. “Pierce was game. He would skip down the hill multiple times … and I think Colin Firth meant all of his moves ironically.”
When “we finally went down the hill in ‘Dancing Queen’ and landed on the dock, and then it was the end of the number, and the camera would move around, and it usually would avoid Stellan,” she added with a laugh.
Baranski said not even the film’s director, Ol Parker, could persuade the “Dune” star, 73, to loosen up. “He let out a string of expletives,” she recalled. “It’s as though Ol had asked him to do Arabic poetry while jumping rope. He was like, ‘I can’t do that.’”
Skarsgård reflected on his unlikely involvement in “Mamma Mia!” in a February 2024 interview with Vanity Fair. While the actor initially thought it “absurd” to sign onto the musical given his lack of theatrical chops, Brosnan and Firth’s participation warmed him up to the idea.
“In a film that is produced by men and directed by men (and) with men in the lead, you have the bimbo. And we were the bimbos in this female(-led) production,” Skarsgård said. “We didn’t have to be anything but look cute and be silly.
“There’s only one thing that was asked of us and that was have fun. Because if we don’t have fun, it won’t be a film.”
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