Kristen Bell & Jonathan Groff Reunite for Musical Film MOLLY AND THE MOON

The upcoming musical film is from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. The pair created "How I Met Your Mother."

By: Nov. 05, 2020
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Kristen Bell & Jonathan Groff Reunite for Musical Film MOLLY AND THE MOON

"Frozen" stars Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff will reunite to star in "Molly and the Moon," an upcoming musical film from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. The pair created "How I Met Your Mother."

The musical film is grounded in a personal crisis experienced by Thomas shortly after HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER became popular.

"Carter and I were running the show and between Season Two and Season Three, my wife and I were having our first kid, a boy, Elliot," Thomas told Deadline. "I was heading into parenthood and I figured everything was going according to the life script I imagined for myself. I'm going to have this healthy, perfect kid and come back and keep running that show. Instead, life served up an enormous curve ball to us. We discovered after he was born that Elliot had Jacobsen Syndrome, a rare genetic condition where something is missing in Chromosome 11 chromosomes...there was a genetic deletion where he was missing one of those chromosomes that contain certain genes that have certain functions in making a healthy, typical baby. We got a crash course in genetics all of a sudden and what all of that meant.

"And what it meant for Elliot is that he had several heart defects and needed open-heart surgery at only two weeks old, and we did not see any of this coming," Thomas said. "This was after almost a week in the neonatal intensive care unit in Children's Hospital Los Angeles. And all of a sudden, we are living this completely different story line than we had imagined for ourselves, our son going through OPEN HEART surgery at two weeks old. He weighed only about three and a half pounds, which also was unforeseen. So what ended up happening was, we were in the hospital for six weeks going through two different journeys. One was hoping that our son survived this heart surgery, which had a significant chance of mortality, and also trying to accept that if he lived through this heart surgery, we were going to have a kid who was different, who might have lifelong health and developmental issues. Those two journeys are so intense for anyone to go through. Meanwhile, there's this other journey that was going on, and Carter, as my best friend, had front row seats. What Carter heard me saying a lot was, 'My god, he's such a brave little boy.' Because Elliot, this little tiny baby, was going through this epic life or death battle, lying in this plastic box, this small incubator."

Kristen graduated from New York University's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied musical theater. She made her Broadway debut in 2001, originating the role of Becky Thatcher in the short-lived "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." In 2002, she was in the revival of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" on Broadway, starring Laura Linney and Liam Neeson.

In 2008, she had her breakout starring film role as the title character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Other notable film roles include: Couples Retreat (2009), When in Rome (2010), You Again (2010), The Boss (2016), Bad Moms (2016), and A Bad Moms Christmas (2017).

In 2013, Bell voiced the main character, Princess Anna of Arendelle, in the Walt Disney Pictures animated movie, Frozen. She performed the songs: 'For the First Time in Forever', 'Love is an Open Door', 'Do You Want to Build a Snowman', and 'For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)'.

Jonathan Groff's credits include-

Broadway: Hamilton, Spring Awakening, In My Life. Off-Broadway: Hamilton (The Public), A New Brain (Encores! Off Center), The Submission (MCC), The Bacchae (The Public), Obie Award for Prayer for My Enemy (Playwrights Horizons) and The Singing Forest (The Public), Hair (The Public), Spring Awakening (Atlantic). West End: Deathtrap. Regional: Red (Mark Taper Forum). TV: HBO's "Looking," "Boss," "Glee." Film: Frozen 2, American Sniper, The Normal Heart, Frozen, C.O.G., The Conspirator, Twelve-Thirty, Taking Woodstock.

Other theatre credits include the off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors (2019), Sondheim on Sondheim (Hollywood Bowl, 2016), Deathtrap (West End, 2010), and Fame (North Shore Music Theatre, 2005).



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