Halle Bailey sings 'Part of Your World' as a plea rather than a wish, and for four minutes of The Little Mermaid she carries a film that does not otherwise deserve her. Her films have not yet asked what she can do without a song.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Halle Bailey's Ariel in the moments before she sings. The chin is up, the eyes are wide, and she looks at the hull of the ship above her as though it already belonged to her. It is the posture of a teenager who has decided the world is elsewhere and will not be talked out of it, and Bailey holds it through long stretches of Rob Marshall's The Little Mermaid (2023) in which she has nothing to say. Then Alan Menken's old melody starts and the posture becomes a voice. She sings 'Part of Your World' as a plea rather than a wish, and we were moved far more than we expected to be by a song we have heard in every school hall in the country. It is the only sequence in that film better than the cartoon.
The voice came first, which explains a good deal. Bailey and her sister Chlöe began as a cover duo on YouTube, Chloe x Halle, were signed to Beyoncé's Parkwood label around 2015 and toured with her, and the acting has run alongside the records ever since: four years as Sky Forster in Grown-ish (2018–2022), then Ariel, her first film lead. The films since have kept her close to a song. She was young Nettie in The Color Purple (2023), Anna opposite Regé-Jean Page in You, Me & Tuscany (2026), and Stef in Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut (2026), a comedy about a community theatre musical. Three musicals in four years is a pattern, and it is the industry's pattern rather than hers.
So what we know is what she does when she sings and what she does while waiting to. The first is settled. The second is the more interesting question, and nobody has properly put it to her. The Little Mermaid is murky under the water and afraid to change anything, and in the scenes where Ariel has no lines Bailey does the film's best acting with her eyes and a few gestures; we wrote at the time that she deserved a film built around what she can do rather than around what someone else once drew. The Debut is a better film, and it is not hers. It belongs to Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, whose rows are the funniest thing in it, and Bailey is one of the company Eisenberg gathers round them, alongside K. Todd Freeman, Colton Ryan, Bonnie Milligan and Bernadette Peters. We did not leave talking about her, and we do not think we were meant to.
She has said of Ariel, "She knew where she wanted to go, and she wasn't going to let anybody stop her," and that is also the only kind of part she has been offered: the girl who wants out. It suits her. It is also the easy thing to cast a singer as, because the wanting can always be handed to the song. Somebody should give her a part with no music in it and a reason to stand still. We suspect she would be good, and we would like to stop having to suspect.
Biography
Halle Bailey is an American singer-songwriter and actress. She first came to prominence as one half of the R&B duo Chloe x Halle with her sister Chloe Bailey. The pair released the albums The Kids Are Alright (2018) and Ungodly Hour (2020), and received five Grammy Award nominations together.
Bailey has acted in the television series Grown-ish (2018–2022) as Sky Forster. Her film roles include a supporting part in Last Holiday (2006) and Young Nettie in The Color Purple (2023). She starred as Ariel in Disney's The Little Mermaid (2023).
