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“Can you sing?”
Aaron Pierre looked at the text message and didn’t know how to respond. The British actor was about to land the lead role in Mufasa: The Lion King, but the question from director Barry Jenkins had suddenly given him pause. He’d sung at home, privately in the shower. But professionally? In a Disney movie? Voicing a character made iconic by James Earl Jones?
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” Pierre, 30, says. “I was really, really unsure about whether I could do this.”
Pierre understood the legacy at stake. As a kid, The Lion King was his favorite movie. He loved it for all the reasons it earned critical and commercial success, spawned animated sequels, and became a Broadway hit: the music, the artwork, the circle of life. Watching his West African roots celebrated and brought to life in bold color on a huge screen resonated with him even more. “I just felt seen, I felt heard, I felt included,” he says. “As opposed to looking at something, I felt like I was in something.”
He had the same feeling when he read the script for Mufasa. The prequel follows the regal lion before he ascends the throne and acquires Jones’s thunderous roar—first as a stray cub, then an adolescent outsider, protecting his stepbrother Taka (Scar) on a journey to a mystical prideland. Naturally, the prospect of adding his creamy-but-untested baritone to this franchise’s chorus scared him. But even kings get scared, he thought. He knew he needed to try.
“When it comes to certain decisions that I make in my career, I have a habit of leaning into opportunities that challenge me to grow and evolve and learn more about myself as an artist, and more importantly, as a man, as a human being,” Pierre says. “And so I just went for it.”
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