'Frozen' Secrets Including the Actress First Cast as Elsa, a Role Kristen Bell & Idina Menzel Auditioned For But Didn't Book & More

The original movie was going to be very different…

“It opened with Elsa’s wedding, and she was jilted at the altar. She ran out of the church, ran up to the mountains, and made a wish on a star so that she would never feel this pain again,” codirector and cowriter Chris Buck recalled. “The wish froze her heart, so she would never feel pain—but she also couldn’t feel love again. She couldn’t feel anything. She was basically a villain.”

There was another very big difference in the plot: “Anna and Elsa, they knew each other. They lived in the same village. Believing that Elsa was not a bad person, and was not evil, Anna was the one that was going to save Elsa.”

Elsa and Anna were almost played by very different actresses…

An early table read for the movie, then titled Anna and the Snow Queen, saw Megan Mullally playing Elsa. Ginnifer Goodwin read for Anna. Both Josh and Santino Fontana were attached to the project, but their roles shifted dramatically.

“It was much more, I would say, like previous Disney films—just more traditional storytelling. [Olaf] was like a Iago [from Aladdin],” Josh recalled.

How did Kristen and Idina get involved? That’s an interesting story…