Nearly three months after Emma Watson was announced as Belle, major casting for Disney’s live action musical adaptation of Beauty And The Beast is finally complete. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ewan McGregor is in final talks to voice Lumière, the film’s suave singing candlestick. The French candelabra performs the iconic song “Be Our Guest,” which will let McGregor show off the pipes he put to use in 2001’s Moulin Rogue. The late, great Jerry Orbach played Lumière in the original Disney cartoon, and his melodic voice stands in sharp contrast to McGregor’s strong but oddly vibrato-less tone.
McGregor’s main partners in crime will be Ian McKellen’s grumpy clock Cogsworth and Emma Thompson’s maternal Mrs. Potts. He’ll also get the chance to seduce Gugu Mbatha Raw’s flirty feather duster and defend a castle with Audra McDonald’s outspoken wardrobe. The exact logistics of how the film will create its magical world aren’t yet known, but presumably all of these actors will lend their voices to CGI creations. Rounding out the live action cast are Dan Stevens as the Beast, Luke Evans as the boorish Gaston, Josh Gad as his sidekick LeFou, and Kevin Kline as Belle’s bumbling father Maurice.
With casting finally finished (several days after the film’s first table read, which McKellen documented on social media), we can hopefully stop writing about this film until it hits theaters in March 2017.