Greta Gerwig Explains Why All Background Actors on ‘Barbie’ Are Dancers

Even though life is plastic and fantastic in the Barbie world, you still have to do the work to make it look so. The blockbuster’s director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) recently talked about how she envisioned the world of Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) and the decisions she had to make in order to look as upbeat as possible in a round table interview with Entertainment Weekly.

During the interview, Gerwig talked about making every inch of Barbie Land vibrant, and one way to make the world filled with live-action dolls feel different was to only hire background actors who are also dancers. The director explains that the decision is easy to understand after you just observe how background dancers behave in musicals – even when they are standing still:

“In terms of how they moved and how they behaved, I wanted it to feel heightened, but I didn’t want it to feel like a sketch. In soundstage musicals like ‘Oklahoma!’ or ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ there’s a quality in the way people move. So all the Barbies and Kens you see on the beach [and other dance sequence settings] hold themselves differently. Our choreographer said dancers, their bodies always have a direction that’s different [from] normal people. So that was kind of like in this conception of Barbie Land, it’s like a soundstage musical.”

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What to Expect from Barbie

As the trailers have made it clear, there will be a pretty clear divide in Barbie. In one section of the movie, we’ll get to see all Barbies and Kens live in Barbie Land without a care in the world. But something will make two of them discover they live in a fantasy and escape to the real world, where they’ll meet humans and the company responsible for their existence, Mattel. How exactly those worlds will collide and the outcome of Barbie making this discovery, we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to find out.

The all-star cast of Barbie also features Issa Rae (Insecure), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Emma Mackey (Sex Education), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Secret Invasion), Hari Nef (The Idol), John Cena (Fast X), Kate McKinnon (SNL), Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Dark Phoenix), Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who), Will Ferrell (Blades of Glory), Michael Cera (Arrested Development), America Ferrera (Superstore), Emerald Fennell (The Crown) and singer-songwriter Dua Lipa.

Barbie – or Barbenheimer if you prefer – premieres in theaters on July 21.

You can check out the trailer below: