“What The Hell Is Spellbound?”: John Lithgow Signed On To A New Animated Movie With A-List Stars & His OG Shrek Director – And Then Forgot

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“What The Hell Is Spellbound?”: John Lithgow Signed On To A New Animated Movie With A-List Stars & His OG Shrek Director – And Then Forgot


John Lithgow reveals how he forgot he was in Spellbound. The upcoming Netflix animated movie was helmed by Vicky Jenson, the co-director of 2001’s Shrek (in which Lithgow voiced Lord Farquaad), and follows a young girl who must save her kingdom from a spell that has turned her parents into monsters. In addition to Lithgow (as Minister Bolinar), the upcoming Spellbound also stars Rachel Zegler as the lead character Princess Ellian, Nicole Kidman as Ellian’s mother, Javier Bardem as Ellian’s father, Jenifer Lewis as Minister Nazara Prone, Tituss Burgess as Ludo, Nathan Lane as Sunny, and Jordan Fisher as Callan.

Screen Rant‘s Owen Danoff recently had the opportunity to sit down with John Lithgow for an interview. While the actor expressed enthusiasm for the project, calling it “stirring and ambitious and possibly even important,” he revealed that he at one point forgot he had signed on to do it. He explains that animated movies go into production “like five years before anybody sees them.” While he was excited by the star-studded cast and the chance to reunite with Jenson, eight months passed after he signed on because “voicing an animated film is not a lot of work.”

Because of this delay, when the time finally came to record his first lines, his reaction was, “What the hell is Spellbound?” Read Lithgow’s full quote below:

Animation films come calling like five years before anybody sees them, and it’s usually a paragraph describing the project. And when they invited me to do this, that paragraph included the names Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, and Nathan Lane, and that certainly caught my eye. Also, [there was] Vicky Jenson, who had directed me in a little film called Shrek many, many years ago, and I remembered her very fondly. I remember reading the short description of the plot and thought, “I don’t know what this is all about, but for sure I want to be involved,” and that was pretty much it. I said “Yes.”

Voicing an animated film is not a lot of work. It takes place over a few years and you show up once [every] eight months and give them some more stuff to animate. So, it was an easy thing to say yes to, but I have to confess: I said yes and, sure enough, eight months later, I got a call—“It’s time for you to start recording Spellbound”—and my response was, “What the hell is Spellbound?”

I was overwhelmed when I went into the recording studio and there was my friend Vicky and several other people I’d worked with before. They told me the whole story and the big idea of this film, which is to address a subject that is almost never dealt with very directly with entertainment for children: how does a child deal with and internalize strife between parents?

To me, it seemed like such a daring thing to take on–a real experiment. You just simply didn’t know whether this was going to work or not. I was really impressed and terribly moved when they showed me little mockups of scenes that they’d already done and I heard Rachel Zegler’s extraordinary voice singing these songs. I just burst into tears, and I thought, “I’m involved in something so stirring and ambitious and possibly even important,” and I knew I would have no trouble at all playing this ridiculous little man, Bolinar.

What This Means For Spellbound

Years Have Gone Into The Making Of The Movie

As Lithgow’s comment proves, the 2024 animated movie is many years in the making. In fact, it was originally announced by Skydance Animation in 2017, though its atypically long pre-production came as a result of it changing hands several times, including its distribution changing hands from Paramount Pictures to Apple TV+ and then finally to Netflix. However, this extended production process, which was also complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, may have allowed the movie to come out at the perfect time.

Production on Spellbound was conducted remotely amid distancing protocols during the pandemic.

As an animated musical featuring Alan Menken compositions, the movie boasts several similarities to classic Disney animated movies. However, the early 2020s were rough on Disney animation, with 2021’s Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto, 2022’s Strange World, and 2023’s Wish all becoming theatrical disappointments or outright flops. Now that Spellbound is poised to come in the wake of the release of Disney’s Pixar title Inside Out 2, which has become the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, its delays may have given it the opportunity to potentially ride the wave of increased general enthusiasm for animation.

Forgetting The Movie Doesn’t Signify Disinterest

As Lithgow himself explains, forgetting Spellbound did not happen because he dislikes the project. It remains to be seen if critics and audiences have the same kind of enthusiastic response to the movie, as the movie does not yet have a Rotten Tomatoes score from either group ahead of its premiere, but it could become a solid success if its well-timed release is compounded by viewers having the same reaction to the story that the star did to the script.



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