Michelle Solomon, ATCA, FFCC

Billy Magnussen who plays Rapunzel's dashing Prince in Disney's Into the Woods has quite a Hollywood story about how he got to audition for the part of the younger brother of Cinderella's Prince Charming.

While performing at New York's Lincoln Center in the Christopher Durang play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spikeopposite David Hyde Pierce, with whom he shared a dressing room, a visitor knocked on the door after the show.

"The door opens and it's Meryl Streep," Magnussen recalled during a recent interview at the Mandarin Oriental, Miami.

"She congratulated me on my performance and then I heard through the grapevine that she had mentioned me to Rob Marshall (the director of Into the Woods) and Mark Platt (the movie's producer). 'You have to see this kid. I think he'd be great as Rapunzel's prince.' And then I got an audition."

After he got the part, Magnussen was at the first "read through" of the film's script. He recalls: "Meryl turned to me and said kiddingly, 'you know, I got you this part.' "

For MacKenzie Mauzy, who appeared on Broadway in Next to Normal, and who has multiple scenes in the film with Streep, she says the 18-time Academy Award nominee taught her much about working as part of an ensemble."She respects people and she respects their artistic vision," says Mauzy.

Magnussen agrees: "With Meryl, it's that we are all working on this project; it's not just Meryl Streep. Everyone has an important job to do even right down to the grip."

Both Mauzy and Magnussen have more theater in their professional careers than film, so being part of Into the Woods was a natural for them to help bring a Stephen Sondheim musical to the big screen."Sondheim is such a master of the musical. With Into the Woods, he puts a palette of so many wonderful colors in front of you and you just get to play with it. I remember recording with Chris (Pine) the song Agony and Sondheim says to us, 'remember, this is a love story,' " says Magnussen. 

"Sondheim is so open to allowing the person who is playing the character and to let them discover what they find in his music," according to the actor.

Mauzy remembers when she was working with Streep on the songStay With Me. "Meryl and I were talking about how Sondheim writes so much intention into the characters. I respect him so much. There's so much storytelling in ever single line of the music and every time I listen to it, I hear something else."

The music for the film was pre-recorded over a two week period at Angel Studios in London with a 56-piece orchestra that features some of the best musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic.  Some of the music, too, was recorded live."Mostly it was pre recorded and we sang along, but when it felt like it would be better or more natural to sing, we did it live," says Mauzy.

Talent performed the songs a number of different ways: singing live to camera on set, singing to pre-recorded music in the studio, and singing live with the orchestra, also in the studio.""The key to the musical performances," Marshall said in a release from Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, "is that, whether they're pre-recorded or sing live, they all must feel live, as if they are happening in the moment. The audience should never know. That's the goal."

For the two Broadway actors, Into the Woods was closer to doing a theater production than following a usual film schedule. "We had a month of rehearsals before we even started principally shooting. Then we did the two weeks of recording. In most films, you just memorize your lines and show up, but here we got to dive into the relationships and make moments out of that," says Magnussen, who just finished a film project with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg that will be released in October 2015.

And shooting on location in some wonderfully lush environments was also a new experience for both of the actors."Most all of the shooting was done outside," recalls Mauzy. "The swamp (scenes) were in a swamp and when Billy was riding the horse blindfolded, he really was."

Principal photography kicked off deep in the ancient forst of the Ashridge Estate on the outskirts of Berkhamsted in the United Kingdom in September 2013. The forest is one of the oldest and most historic wildlife areas in the region. Rapunzel's tower was built inside the ruins of the 18th century Waverly Abbey, located in Farnham, Surrey."The sets had a sense of a fairy tale, but at the same time were very real and haunting," says Mauzy.

Into the Woods has, at its core, a fairytale theme, so what do the actors hope that moviegoers take away from the movie musical? For Mauzy it's about realizing the reality of wishes and dreams. "You have these people who have wishes and dreams, but in order to hold on to those things it doesn't mean that things have to line up perfectly along the way. These characters are trying to still go after what they want in a world where things are broken and there's a lot of unknown."

Magnussen adds his take: "The story that I really wanted to share is that you don't need Prince Charming. Maybe you don't need the perfect man, you just need the right one."