Frozen’s Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff to Star in Movie Musical ‘Molly and the Moon‘. The world is ready for more heartfelt stories and this one sounds like we should have the tissues at the ready! A new musical film called “Molly and the Moon” will feature the story of an unborn baby girl named Molly and her parents, Kate and Brian. Story Co-Creator Craig Thomas shared the inspiration for the story came from personal experience with his own son Elliot’s birth.
“Carter [Bays] and I were running [How I Met Your Mother] and between Season 2 and Season 3, my wife and I were having our first kid, a boy, Elliot,” Thomas shared with Deadline. “I was heading into parenthood and I figured everything was going according to the life script I imagined for myself. I’m going to have this healthy, perfect kid and come back and keep running that show. Instead, life served up an enormous curveball to us. We discovered after he was born that Elliot had Jacobsen Syndrome, a rare genetic deletion where a piece of one of the 11th chromosomes has broken off, resulting in the loss of certain genes that go into making a healthy, typical baby.”
“And what it meant for Elliot is that he had several heart defects and needed open-heart surgery at only two weeks old, and we did not see any of this coming. This was after almost a week in the neonatal intensive care unit in Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. And all of a sudden, we are living this completely different story line than we had imagined for ourselves, our son going through open heart surgery at 2 weeks old. He weighed only about three and a half pounds, which also was unforeseen. So what ended up happening was, we were in the hospital for six weeks going through two different journeys. One was hoping that our son survived this heart surgery, which had a significant chance of mortality, and also trying to accept that if he lived through this heart surgery, we were going to have a kid who was different, who might have lifelong health and developmental issues. Those two journeys are so intense for anyone to go through. Meanwhile, there’s this other journey that was going on, and Carter, as my best friend, had front-row seats. What Carter heard me saying a lot was, ‘My god, he’s such a brave little boy.’ Because Elliot, this little tiny baby, was going through this epic life or death battle, lying in this plastic box, this small incubator.”
“It was way too real at the time, but we always had this knowledge, that when the dust settled, Craig would need to tell this story,” Bays added. “As a writer, you look for the happy endings in life. There was no happier ending that I can recall from anyone’s life or anyone I know than the day Elliot, Craig, and Rebecca came home from the hospital, and an incredible journey culminated in just putting your baby down in the crib. It was…monumental.”
He continued, “Musicals are always about the first moments that prove why they are musicals. Kate, our lead character, the mother, is singing a lullaby to her pregnant belly and the camera pushes in on her pregnant belly and that is our entrance into a whole other world where we see a mysterious little girl in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, looking up at the moon and hearing that song, hearing that lullaby come through the moon. It’s the moment you realize there’s this little soul, this life that wants to exist and be in the world and wants to reach the sound of that voice. She doesn’t know what it means or who it is. It just sounds like love, and she wants to reach it, and that’s sort of the moment that we connect the two worlds of our movie, the world of Molly and the real world that her parents are living in.”
Deadline shared the exclusive, reporting, “Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff will star in Molly and the Moon, an original musical that How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas scripted, and they will direct. Harvey Mason Jr (Sing and the Pitch Perfect films) will be the executive music producer, Stephanie Diaz-Matos (The Get Down) will be the music supervisor and Nathan Larson the composer.”
“I had to tell this story, to honor my son and because there are just tens of millions of people in this country, and more around the world, whose lives have been touched by something like this,” Thomas concluded. “So many parents have kids who have to find their way through some sort of difficulty. My favorite quote about parenthood is, to have a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. That is really how it feels.”
Bell will be playing Molly’s mother, Kate, with Groff portraying Molly’s father Brian. Currently it is unknown which studio the film will be will produced by Bays and Thomas along with Jared Ian Goldman and Renee Witt and Jamal Daniel via the Levantine Films studio banner. Tory Metzger is exec producer. Be sure to check back here at Chip and Co. for updates and all things entertainment!
Featured Photo Credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images/Disney
Source: Deadline
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