Are you looking for a family friendly movie film that you can watch from the comfort of your home?  If so, I highly recommend Lady and the Tramp on Disney Plus.  I’ve seen it twice now – once during The Geekly Retreat and the second time, at home with my son and our golden retriever 🙂  While the movie is primarily about dogs, the actors and the actresses in the movie also stand out, including Yvette Nicole Brown and Adrian Martinez.  They both play villain type of roles in the movie and during the retreat, we had the opportunity to interview them and ask them all about it.  Keep reading to find out how they humanized their roles and who ad libbed a line in the movie to make their character more sympathetic!

Yvette Nicole Brown:  Villains Don’t See Themselves as Villains

I’ve always wondered whether actors and actresses find it difficult to play their villainous roles.  People love to hate villains, and often times, it’s the villain that makes a movie unforgettable.  And there’s also usually some type of villain in most movies, whether it’s an over-the-top villain, or a villain who is more low key.  There are even villains who are misunderstood, like Maleficent.

How Villains Perceive Themselves

I was able to get a different perspective on villains during an interview with Lady and the Tramp cast members Yvette Nicole Brown and Adrian Martinez.  Yvette Nicole Brown plays Aunt Sarah, who isn’t nice to Lady.  And Adrian Martinez plays Elliot, the dogcatcher who is always trying to capture Tramp.

During the interview, Yvette Nicole Brown explained that she tried to make Aunt Sarah more sympathetic:  “No human thinks they are the villain. So they wouldn’t think they were the bad guy.  If you take the role, you have to play the character that you’re given and you have to be sympathetic, sympathetic to them.”  If an actress or actor can’t find something worthwhile in their role, Yvette Nicole Brown’s advice is “Don’t take the role.  You have to find something in them that’s worthwhile.”

So how did she make her character more sympathetic?  She ad libbed a particular line in the movie that made Aunt Sarah more relatable.  Aunt Sarah just wants to take care of Jim Dear and Darling’s newborn baby, Lulu.  So much that when Aunt Sarah wasn’t able to hold Lulu, she said “I didn’t even get to hold her.”

How Actors and Actresses Prepare for Their Roles

Adrian Martinez described how he prepared for his role as Elliot:  “And for me when I prepared for this, what was Elliot’s greatest pain? It was that the fact that nobody gets him.  Nobody gets him and he’s just trying to maintain the order of the town.  And I could also imagine how isolating and lonely he was.”

It’s interesting to see the different methods that actors and actresses use in order to prepare for their roles.  After listening to Yvette Nicole Brown and Adrian Martinez during the interview, I had a different perspective of Aunt Sarah and Elliot the second time I watched Lady and the Tramp.

To read about my other interviews like the Frozen 2 press junket, click here!