Kylie Minogue, Jonathan Groff and Catherine Tate Join Cynthia Erivo in Animated Musical ‘Bad Fairies’

Some casting announcements arrive as a press release and a shrug. This one arrived mid-concert, in front of a packed Hollywood Bowl, with Cynthia Erivo walking straight into the crowd to hug her newest co-star.

On Thursday night, October 15, Erivo was on stage for her one-night-only concert Let Me Sing to You when she dropped the news: Kylie Minogue, Jonathan Groff and Catherine Tate are joining her in Bad Fairies, the new animated musical comedy from Warner Bros. and Locksmith Animation. The crowd got it first. The internet got it about thirty seconds later.

And honestly? It is a pretty inspired lineup. A pop icon who has spent nearly four decades reinventing herself, a Broadway star who can make a room go quiet with one note, a comedy legend who can steal a scene with an eyebrow, and Erivo — who right now might be the most in-demand singing actress on the planet — leading the whole thing. If you were building a fairy-tale musical from scratch and you got to pick anyone, this is the kind of cast list you would scribble down and then laugh at because there is no way you could actually get them all.

Somehow, they got them all.

How the announcement landed at the Hollywood Bowl

Erivo did not just read names off a card. She built the moment into the show.

During Let Me Sing to You, she teased an orchestral arrangement of a song from the film — “Hard to Believe,” her character Jayne’s number — and let the Bowl hear a taste of what Bad Fairies is going to sound like. Then came the reveal. Minogue, Groff and Tate were joining the voice cast. And then Erivo did what Erivo does: she made it personal. She walked out into the audience and hugged Kylie.

It is the kind of moment that does not quite translate in a headline. A concert crowd, a surprise announcement, two stars hugging in the aisle like old friends. That is the story. A press release can tell you who got cast. It cannot tell you how it felt to be in the room.

The timing was no accident, either. A one-night-only Hollywood Bowl show is already an event. Turning it into a casting launch turns it into something people talk about the next morning — which, if you are trying to get an animated musical on everyone’s radar a good seven months before it opens, is exactly the point.

Erivo has been on a tear lately, and this show felt like a victory lap with a preview attached. She has spent years stacking stage, screen and concert work into a career that looks, from the outside, almost impossibly busy. A night at the Bowl, a new movie announcement, a song preview — all in one evening. Some people have a quiet Thursday. Erivo had that.

Who’s playing who in Bad Fairies

So, the roles. This is where it gets fun, because the character names alone tell you this is not your standard sparkly fairy movie.

Erivo leads the film as Jayne Staplegun. We do not know a lot about Jayne yet, beyond the fact that she gets the big song Erivo previewed at the Bowl. But if she is the anchor of a gang of troublemaking fairies, you can guess she is not exactly the sit-quietly-and-wave-a-wand type. Erivo does not do boring. Her Jayne is going to have edges.

Minogue plays Chowder the Cat Witch. Read that again. Chowder. The Cat Witch. It is the kind of role that sounds like it was dreamed up at 2 a.m. and then kept because everybody in the room could not stop laughing. Minogue herself seemed delighted by the double act — getting to play both a cat and a witch, which she described as “a little bit magical, a little bit mischievous and a whole lot of fun.” She is not wrong. It is also, frankly, perfect casting. Kylie has spent a career being charming and a little bit wicked at the same time, and a cat witch lets her lean all the way into both.

Groff plays Robin Goodfellow. If that name rings a bell, it should — Robin Goodfellow is another name for Puck, the trickster from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So no, Groff is probably not playing the sensible one. He is playing the mischief-maker, the one who stirs the pot and then looks innocent about it. Anyone who has seen Groff on stage knows he can do sweet and scheming in the same breath. This is his lane.

And then there is Tate as the Fairy Godmother. Now, the Fairy Godmother is usually the calm, kindly one. The one who waves a wand and fixes everything. Put Catherine Tate in that role and you have to wonder — is this Fairy Godmother going to be calm? Or is she going to be the funniest person in the room, the one who means well and causes chaos anyway? Tate has made a career out of characters who are warm, rude, ridiculous and lovable all at once. A Fairy Godmother with that energy could steal the whole film.

The rest of the voice cast was already announced, and it is just as eclectic. Serrana Su-Ling Bliss plays Fei Chang. James Acaster — yes, the comedian — plays Stickers. Dee Bradley Baker, who has voiced approximately half the creatures in modern animation, plays Groundbeef. And Ncuti Gatwa plays Butterwort. Groundbeef. Butterwort. Stickers. These are not names you forget. Whoever named the characters in this movie was having a very good day.

Why this cast clicks

On paper, these four come from completely different planets. Pop. Broadway. Sketch comedy. The West End and Hollywood — sometimes in the same week, if we are talking about Erivo. Stick them in a recording booth together, though, and suddenly it clicks. Like, oh. Yeah. Of course.

Here is the thing about animated musicals: they live or die on voice. Not just the singing — there will be plenty of that, obviously — but personality. You have to hear a character in three words flat. You have to know who they are before you have even seen them properly. All four of these people can do that in their sleep.

Kylie has been a pop star since the late 1980s, and she is still pulling it off, which — let us be honest — almost nobody manages. That is not luck. She has ridden out trend after trend, reinvented herself more times than most singers get albums, talked about her cancer battle with a frankness that stuck with people, and kept coming back with something fresh. Then “Padam Padam” landed in 2023 and turned into a whole moment — memes, dance floors, radio, all of it — and her Tension era reminded everyone she can still own a stage, a chart and a dance floor at the same time. She has acted too, all the way back to Neighbours, but voice work like this taps into the bit of her toolkit folks sometimes forget: she is properly funny. A cat witch is a brilliant place to let that out.

Groff is one of those actors who keeps turning up in stuff you love and you go, “Oh, it is him, great.” King George III in Hamilton — spitting, scheming, warbling his way through “You’ll Be Back” until a villain was somehow lovable. Kristoff in Frozen. Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway, which people are still talking about. Doctor Who, prestige TV, musical theatre at the very top level. He sings like it is nothing, which it is not, and he acts like he has been at it since birth, which — near enough — he has. A trickster fairy? He will have an absolute field day with that.

Tate, meanwhile, is a British comedy institution. The Catherine Tate Show gave us catchphrases that people still quote. Her run in Doctor Who as Donna Noble turned her from a sketch star into a dramatic favourite, and fans still talk about Donna like she is a real person they miss. She can do broad comedy, she can do heartbreak, and she can do both in the same scene. Give her a wand and a bit of attitude and she will run with it.

And Erivo, right in the middle, holds the whole thing together. Tony for The Color Purple on Broadway. Oscar nomination for playing Harriet Tubman in Harriet. Elphaba in Wicked on the big screen. She sings like it is easy — it is not — and she acts with this intensity that makes you lean forward without realising you are doing it. If Bad Fairies needs a lead who can carry a song, a scene and a whole film, she is the obvious pick. And the fact that she announced her own co-stars from a concert stage? Tells you how much this one means to her.

The team behind the music and the mayhem

A cast this good still needs a script and songs that actually hold up — and the names behind the camera are genuinely encouraging, not just press-release encouraging.

Bad Fairies is directed by Megan Nicole Dong, with Olivier Staphylas co-directing. The script comes from Deborah Frances-White, who knows a thing or two about sharp, funny, female-led storytelling. The songs are by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss — the duo behind Six, the musical that turned Henry VIII’s wives into pop stars and turned a West End hit into a global phenomenon. If anyone knows how to write a catchy, clever, slightly rude musical number, it is those two.

And then there is Isabella “Machine” Summers — yes, from Florence + The Machine — contributing to the score and songs. That mix is fascinating, honestly. The Six writers’ punchy, poppy, slightly rude style plus Summers’ moodier, bigger, more atmospheric sound? It could give Bad Fairies a musical identity that does not sound like every other animated film. Less generic singalong, more actual personality. Fingers crossed.

The film comes from Warner Bros. and Locksmith Animation. Locksmith is the studio behind Ron’s Gone Wrong, a film that was a lot smarter and sweeter than its premise suggested. They are not a factory churning out sequels. They tend to pick original stories with a bit of heart and a bit of bite. Bad Fairies fits that pattern.

What Bad Fairies is actually about — and when we see it

So what is it actually about? The official setup goes like this: Bad Fairies is an original musical comedy set in contemporary London, following a delightfully subversive gang of fairies as they shake up their magical world.

That one line does a lot of work. Contemporary London — not a faraway kingdom, not a fairy-tale past, but now. A gang of fairies — not one lonely fairy learning to believe in herself, but a group. Delightfully subversive — not naughty for the sake of it, but the kind of mischief that has a point. And “shake up their magical world” suggests the fairies are not just causing trouble in ours. Their own world needs a shake-up, too.

It is a nice twist on a genre that can get very safe. Fairy movies often end up sweet and forgettable. This one sounds like it wants to be sweet and a bit rude. The character names back that up. The songwriters back that up. The cast definitely backs that up.

We will not have to wait forever to find out. Bad Fairies is set to open in cinemas on May 21, 2027. That is far enough away that there is still plenty we do not know — no trailer yet, no full plot breakdown, no word on which songs we will be humming by next summer — but close enough that this casting announcement feels like the starting gun. Expect more reveals, more songs, more chaos over the next few months.

For now, the picture is clear enough to get excited about. Erivo leading. Minogue as a cat witch. Groff as a trickster. Tate as a Fairy Godmother who is probably not going to behave. A London full of fairies who refuse to play nice. A Hollywood Bowl crowd that got to hear it first.

Some movies you watch because you feel like you should. This one sounds like the kind you watch because you actually want to — the kind where you stroll in expecting a good time and stroll out quoting the cat witch to anyone who will listen. May 2027 cannot come fast enough, and I am not even pretending to be patient about it.

Source: Just Jared