Lin-Manuel Miranda initially pitched a dancehall-inspired villain song for Mads Mikkelsen’s character Kiros in “Mufasa: The Lion King,” an idea that was perhaps a bit too “counterintuitive” in the end.
Asked whether any tracks didn’t make the cut, the Grammy, Tony and Emmy award-winner, who wrote and co-produced all of the film’s original songs, revealed to TheWrap that his party-banger pitch ultimately gave way to “Bye Bye.”
“One of the things I pitched that wasn’t necessarily spelled out in the script was a song for our bad guy — I really wanted to write a good villain song for Barry [Jenkins], and I called him and I said, ‘This is going to sound crazy,’” Miranda told TheWrap.
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“‘Mads Mikkelsen,’ who’s, like, one of our great movie villains in a lot of his roles, ‘like I’m hearing like a dancehall beat under his voice. I know those are two weird tastes that are going to taste great together. Like, hear me out, it’s counterintuitive,’” Miranda said of his phone brainstorm with director Barry Jenkins.
Nevertheless, Miranda said ultimately he penned the song “Bye Bye.”
“Being able to write ‘Bye Bye’ and figure out where that goes in the movie was one of the great challenges and really fun parts of making the movie,” Miranda concluded.
While “Mufasa” stands as the origin story for Simba’s father, it also works to tell the early beginnings of Scar, which the film introduces as a young cub named Taka. Taka, who comes from a royal bloodline befriends a young Mufasa and welcomes him into his pride. However, Taka’s father, Obasi [Lennie James] casts Mufasa away to live among the female lions where he learns grace, humility and strategic thinking and other skills that ultimately shape him into the leader he one days becomes.
Jenkins said the theme of nurture versus nature and/or the idea good parenting versus bad parenting was an enriching exploration.
“One of the things about the project that I really love is this idea of nature versus nurture. Mufasa sort of loses his family and gets adopted into this other family, and so theoretically he was raised with the same tutelage as Taka, as Scar, but he gets sent to one side of the family and Scar gets sent to the other,” Jenkins explained. “And Obasi is teaching him that deceit is the tool of a great king versus Eshe [Thandiwe Newton] is teaching him you have to be one with the elements, you have to be in tune with your senses, the circle of life emboldens us all, it carries us all — nature versus nurture. This whole schism between the two of them comes about, maybe you could say because of good parenting versus bad parenting. I thought that was a really rich theme and topic to explore.”
“Mufasa: The Lion King” is in theaters.
