Mary Poppins and Jack the lamplighter are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly Holiday Preview Issue with the parrot head umbrella, which cannot get Hamilton tickets, even if now it stars in Mary Poppins Returns with Lin-Manuel Miranda!
Check out the cover and a few new stills in our Gallery.
Under the cut, you can find the parts of the article about Mr. Miranda.
But Blunt allowed the gravity of Mary Poppins to seep in every once in a while, like […] when she visited Miranda backstage at Hamilton in 2015 — her third time doing so, yet the first since they had both signed on to the film. “The whole project was cloaked in a sense of protection, and by that time it had sunk in that it was happening,” she recalls. “It was becoming so deep in my bones that I was going to be doing this, and that first overwhelming rush of thrill and fear when I got offered this role had diluted to something quite real… and so I think it was exciting knowing that Lin and I were going to be playing cohorts and kindred spirits.” Miranda remembers that night just a bit differently: “That was a really stressful show,” he laughs. “I felt like I was auditioning for Mary Poppins, the person.”
Miranda’s Poppins character — Jack, a lamplighter and old friend to Mary and the Banks family — marks the performer’s first major role since creating and starring in Broadway’s Hamilton (look it up). Yet for his big debut, audiences will meet him solely as Lin-Manuel the actor, not Lin-Manuel the Pulitzer-winning writer (although his famous verbal dexterity is certainly on display in the film’s nine new songs, custom-written by Hairspray duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman). Miranda calls Poppins his “first big movie,” but acknowledges how unusual the film actually is from the typical big-movie experience. “The highs were so high, in terms of: ‘Today we’re dancing with penguins, tomorrow we’re dancing with Meryl Streep, the next day we’re biking in front of Buckingham Palace,’” Miranda laughs. “For me, coming from theater, the adrenaline source is having the audience there, and when you take that audience away, where is it? Where does that part come from? And you realize, it comes from ‘We’re never coming back to Buckingham Palace to get a second take.’ The adrenaline source is in getting it right in that moment.”