All of you owe Flounder an apology!
With Disney’s long-awaited live-action reimagining of The Little Mermaid now in theaters, folks have been pretty hard on Ariel’s little bestie.
In the original animated classic from ’89, Flounder was brightly colored, cute and cuddly—your typical cartoon sidekick. But, for some reason, everyone was surprised when we got our first glimpse at photorealistic Flounder in the new movie and he looked like… a fish! What did you expect?
While Flounder 2.0 is voiced by Room‘s Jacob Tremblay, he’s brought to life by a bunch of whizzbang computer-generated imagery we can barely understand, but also—importantly—a live, on-set dancer and puppeteer.
And, baby? That Flounder puppeteer is hot. Who’s laughing now?
Meet Chris George Scott, the handsome man behind the fish.
Scott is a dancer, actor, and choreographer based in the U.K., who has worked for the Royal Opera House, the National Dance Company of Wales, and appeared in the musical Wicked on London’s West End. He’s also got a credit working on 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns—so The Little Mermaid‘s not even his first dance with Disney!
And it just so happens that Scott is gay (yay!). While we’re sad to report he is, indeed, taken (boo!), he’s happily married and the two are so cute together (aww!).
In his post celebrating the new film’s release, Scott shouted out the “extraordinary” new Ariel, Halle Bailey, and the production team for making the “crazy adventure” possible.
Apparently, he wore quite a few hats on set, writing in the caption: “From puppeteering Ursula’s tentacles, being countless sea creatures, dancing in the village sequence, standing in for Max the dog (I’m not joking) and even getting to puppeteer Flounder in Sardinia. It was the wildest wettest ride.”
And speaking of wet… now that Gay Twitter™ knows about Scott, they take back what they said about Flounder earlier.
We’ll just leave these here…
Um, so, where were we? Oh, right! The Little Mermaid! Funny enough, this isn’t even the first time the internet thirsted over the aquatic life in the movie.
Earlier this month, one of the background actors who plays a “merman” in the film posted some BTS shots which quickly made their way to Twitter and had everyone ready to dive into the deep end.
After following the virtual trail to find some of these merfolk on Instagram, we’re starting to think Sebastian the crab made some points when he sang, “Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter.”
Let’s take the plunge!
firtsrowsports
nice
abfab
Sweet, and salty!
paul dorian lord fredine
he wears a lot of hats but have to ask: how old is he? just curious.
cbartley
Wow. They are all so gorgeous. Thirst Trap 101 ? ???
SFMike
Way to white, gay and male to be promoted to anything but puppeteering at Disney.