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My first glimpse at the, let’s say, unique way Kimmy Gatewood approaches making TV shows and movies comes when, just seconds into our Zoom conversation, she pops up from her chair and hurries to the wall behind her. With all the showmanship of one of The Price Is Right’s “Barker’s Beauties,” she demonstrates that the bookshelf is actually a secret door.
“It has all my blazers,” she says, excitedly swanning her arm across them. “What you gotta do is just go to Magic Castle and be like, ‘Now I have to do everything in my home like this.”
A performer and director who helmed the new sequel Descendants: Wicked Wonderland for Disney, Gatewood’s affinity for Los Angeles’ members-only magicians’ clubhouse and, as she’d later tell me, the skill of illusions and sleights of hand track, considering her eclectic career. When you scan her biography and résumé, it starts to seem like you’re pulling an endless stream of random, cool things from one of those bottomless magic hats.
She got her start in New York as a member of The Apple Sisters, a musical comedy trio styled after the popular harmonizing 1940s radio singing acts. After a critically acclaimed appearance at the 2008 Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, the group moved to Los Angeles and, along with fellow member Rebekka Johnson, Gatewood was cast on Netflix’s female wrestling series GLOW.
After that ended, she began directing, with credits that include universally beloved institutions and adaptations like Sesame Street, The Muppets, and The Baby-Sitters Club, as well as series with feverishly passionate fanbases like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Girls5eva, and Ghosts. Now she’s the steward of Disney’s blockbuster kids-and-teens franchise, Descendants, the current generation’s answer to defining cultural touchstones like High School Musical and Camp Rock.
“I like to tell stories about underdogs and identity,” Gatewood says, attempting to find a throughline between those various ventures. “I’m more likely to say yes to something and then dive into the deep than overthink it, and then the moment’s passed.”
Just before we talk, for example, her Girls5eva collaborator, Sara Bareilles, who starred on the series, reached out to ask Gatewood, who had just had a root canal, to direct her new music video this week. Even though she had the Descendants: Wicked Wonderland premiere and all the hoopla that came with it to contend with, Gatewood said yes.
“When Sara puts up the Bareilles Signal, just like the Bat Signal, you go,” she says. (One imagines the Bareilles Signal is the Bat Signal, but the bat is crying. You know, because he was just listening to Sara Bareilles songs.)
It cannot be overstated how massive a deal the Descendants movies are for today’s adolescents, preteens, and the people who love them. Or, heck, for people of any age who just like Disney and musicals. I liken the movies to The Avengers, but for Disney characters. It involves the same fan-servicing mashing-up of storylines and universes. Gatewood more classily likens it to how the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods remixes classic fairy tales.
The original Descendants film premiered on the Disney Channel in 2015, continuing the storylines of the House of Mouse’s most famous animated films and characters. The gateway—or, perhaps, castle drawbridge—to this is that teenage children of Disney villains and royalty are forced to coexist at school: the offspring of Princess Aurora, Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, Jafar, Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts, and more all figure in. Oh, and, obviously, the movies are all musicals.
According to Disney (so take the statistics with a sprinkle of fairy dust), the first three films in the franchise were the most-watched TV movies of the year among kids and tweens, amassing 781 million hours of viewing in the U.S. The fourth film, Descendants: Rise of Red, was the most-viewed DCOM premiere ever on Disney+, and streams of the series’ songs have skyrocketed past 15 billion.
If you had younger siblings who spent 70 percent of their free time making up their own dances to High School Musical’s “We’re All in This Together” or bankrupting their allowance buying up any magazine with Zac Efron on the cover (or maybe that was you; no judgment!), then you have a sense of the scale of the Descendants phenomenon.
Watching the movie with her 11-year-old daughter and nieces and nephews gave Gatewood, before she even began working on the franchise, insight into why it resonates so loudly with this age group.
“I think a lot of it is the idea of feeling misunderstood,” she says. “It’s about villains and heroes. When I was growing up, I felt like I was often split in two. I was like, ‘Do I wanna be a cool, like bad kid, or do I wanna be a good kid?’ Is being a hero a bit nerdy? Is being a villain bad? I think the appeal of it is that kids see themselves in these characters. It’s a little bit of wish fulfillment, imagination at its highest, um, degree because, you know, what kid doesn’t wanna be a princess?”
Well, not Gatewood. When she was growing up, she always wanted to be Ursula. Her idol was Pat Carroll, who did the voice of the sea witch for The Little Mermaid. But that, too, is the point.
The characters in the Descendants movies, she says, make kids feel like “they could be loud, they could be bad, they could be good. They could be complicated. They could like people and get along with people they may not have necessarily understood, and they could also be brave where they were already going to be afraid. It’s really just about identity, which is what this age, in particular, is going through at this moment. Stuck in between adulthood and childhood.”
Plus, she says, “being able to sing your feelings is good.”
Descendants: Wicked Wonderland is set, if you’d believe it, in Wonderland, where everything is curiouser and curiouser than one might expect. That’s both a director’s playground and, perhaps, the greatest stressor. Gatewood has experience stepping into hallowed worlds to create new art. How thrilling to play with the Muppets, for example, but also…how much pressure. How do you move the Muppets forward? You can’t improve the Muppets!
“It ignites creativity in a much different way than maybe one would expect, because you’re practically looking at puppets and they’re moving and talking to you,” Gatewood says. “And it’s the same thing in Wonderland.”
Everywhere on set were giant flowers and gargantuan mushrooms. When talking to a prop master, she’d say she’d need something for a character to build with, like a hammer—“but it needs to be a Wonderland hammer.” Completely understanding, they’d then return “with this spectacular glowing thing.”
Gatewood has found that all that eclectic past experience collectively populated a toolbox for her to execute a project of this magnitude, with added expectations of Disney magic: “A lot of great ideas are born from painting yourself into a corner, not knowing how to get out, and having to come up with an idea.”
On Girls5eva, there was an episode where a character played by Andrew Rannells built a hermit crab farm, so Gatewood needed a hermit crab for the scene. There was no budget for a CGI crustacean—“I asked”—and a real hermit crab, she was told, would require eight weeks of training to do what was needed.
But Gatewood had worked on Sesame Street, which was shooting across the studio. She called on her experience and contacts there: “We could build a puppet hermit crab!” It cost $250 bucks, a few puppeteers came in, and the result was hilarious.
“When you’re living in these fantasy lands, it’s never your first instinct,” she says. “You have to go into what’s weirder.”
Or, in this Descendants sequel’s case, you have to go towards what’s wickeder.
Descendants: Wicked Wonderland premieres July 16 on Disney Channel and streams on Disney+ beginning July 17.
