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Parker: Without Meryl, we needed something in the last act to turn up and give it a real jolt. Parker and Curtis just needed to cement their final-act surprise.
They sent the finished script to Meryl, knowing that if she said, “No, I do not want to be a ghost,” the whole thing was a nonstarter. “He really wrote everything that’s good in the script, and then I just helped him with a bit of rewriting and moving things about after that,” Curtis said. With Streep’s fate sealed, Parker and Curtis went off to spend a week together in a “little shepherd’s hut” in Curtis’s garden with no internet, ordering the film’s songs and sequences on a pack of Post-it notes that Parker used to write the actual script. It’s got an element of Greek tragedy about it. Richard Curtis, story co-writer: We thought death was better than a long trip to Hawaii.Ĭraymer: It wasn’t like a soap-opera death. But if she’s not going to be in it, then you’ve gotta own that. Parker: There were various versions of the script where she was stranded in the Philippines and unable to make it back for Colin’s gay wedding. Lily James, Young Donna: I think I’d actively forgotten that she’d actually died. Judy Craymer, producer: Oh God, it was terrible. I was like, “You got to kill her and just give her a song as a ghost.” The producers were obviously skeptical about that because that’s not quite the mood of the piece.
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Ol Parker, director and screenwriter: I inherited this movie without Meryl in it, so it was my idea to kill her off. You’ve got to have what happens in the present, but you’ve got to go back and see where it all started.’ I think Scarlett got paid a dollar because Universal said she had to be paid something.” The team knew, then, what they’d have to do with Streep. “I said to her, ‘Any ideas for Mamma Mia 2 ?’ And Scarlett said, ‘Yeah, it’s obvious.’ I said, ‘It can’t be that obvious because it’s taken them ten years to figure it out.’ Scarlett said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s Godfather 2.
It was actually Curtis’s daughter, Scarlett, then in her early 20s, who surfaced a solution during a car ride with her dad. “It was a long, agonizing process,” Curtis said.
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The key was figuring out how to bring her back both quickly and believably. The story involves death, birth, directorial breakdowns, digitized mouths, a jaw-dropping amount of partying, and a collective abandon that’s rare to see onscreen.īefore any time- and space-defying ending could be realized, the biggest hurdle in bringing Mamma Mia 2 to the screen was figuring out what the hell to do about Streep, who, as Craymer put it, “doesn’t love doing sequels.” Craymer, Parker, and Curtis knew they couldn’t make a second film without her. We spoke to Parker, Curtis, producer Judy Craymer, and many of our favorite Mamma Mia 2 scene-stealers about what went into concluding a sequel that probably should never have happened in the first place. The whole thing is simultaneously campy and straight-facedly earnest, coming together with the goofy, heartfelt energy of a slapdash community theater production, albeit one put on by some of the most famous actors in the world.īut its epic conclusion is even more charmingly arbitrary, a space-time-melting, death-defying, and even sob-inducing 30-plus-minute sequence that includes but is not limited to: Cher helicoptering out of nowhere onto said Greek island Cher making out with Andy Garcia after singing ABBA’s “Fernando” Lily James giving strenuous birth atop a mountain an improvised dance routine wherein Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, and Pierce Brosnan shimmy in spandex alongside their younger counterparts, defying time and space and the ghost of Streep. Mamma Mia 2 flashes back and forth between young hippie Donna Sheridan’s (Lily James) early dating misadventures, which eventually lead her to a faraway Greek island where she conceives her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who, in the present day, is involved in a manic attempt to realize her now-dead mother’s (Meryl Streep) dream of opening a remote Grecian inn. It is about coming back from the dead it is about getting accidentally pregnant it is an ode to DIY renovation and shagging across 1970s Europe. It’s difficult to capture its psychedelic, heartwarming essence with mere human words. Written and directed by Ol Parker with help from rom-com legend Richard Curtis, the much-maligned and much-beloved 2018 sequel feels like a dream you might have after falling off a ladder and being knocked unconscious. There are drugs, and then there is the ending of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. We are republishing it in honor of Vulture’s Sequels Week.