Hexed Creative Team Previews The Central Dynamics Of Disney's Magical Animated Movie

Published Oct 12, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

As a graduate of Columbia University in New York City, Tatiana studied theater and comparative literature. She has been passionate about all manner of storytelling from Jane Austen adaptations to anime. Aside from writing for Screen Rant, she co-hosts podcasts: The Flash Podcast and Ladies With Gumption.

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Much has been made of the fact that Disney's upcoming animated film Hexed is a fantastical adventure full of witchcraft, but the core relationship at the heart of the story is more mortal than magical. The movie follows Billie Doe (voiced by Spider-Verse veteran Hailee Steinfeld), who accidentally opens a portal to the realm of Hexe. It is there that she learns the family secret her mother, Alice (Rashida Jones), has been keeping from her for her entire life.

Billie and Alice are clashing at the start of Hexed due to the latter's overprotective parenting, which inadvertently makes Billie feel like there's something wrong with her that needs to be hidden away. The truth turns out to be much stranger, propelling the teenager on a journey through a secret witch world filled with incredible characters — including the three-eyed cat, Beef Roger (voiced by Walton Goggins), and Queen Celeste (Jodie Foster).

ScreenRant attended an early press day for Hexed, where press outlets watched several scenes from the movie and were offered insight into Disney's production process. Producers Roy Conli and Yvett Merino, directors Fawn Veerasunhorn and Jason Hand, and writers Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller then shared how the central dynamic between Billie and her mother evolved behind the scenes in individual interviews.

Guiding Hexed Through Various Iterations

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ScreenRant: What is the overlap between one project and the next? At what point do you know what's coming next, and does one inform the other in any way?

Yvett Merino: I had finished up Zootopia 2, and then hopped on. I was always excited to jump into this world. Roy was working on it and, as I was finishing up Zootopia 2, I was looking over like, "What's happening over at Hexed? That looks so exciting." I was thrilled to come back.

Ray Conli: And I can't tell you, I couldn't wish for a better partner. It's been great. I've been on it for about three and a half years, just in terms of coming out of development into the film itself, starting production, and going through the whole cycle with story and whatnot.

Jason Hand: For me, I knew I wanted to be a part of an original film. Hex was coming up, and I really loved the idea of making a film about magic and witches. It felt like something we hadn't done for a long time, so I wanted to join that one from when I was in the middle of Moana 2, actually.

Fawn Veerasunhorn: I heard about this project through Josie [Trinidad], who pitched a movie about witches with awesome world-building. But it's also a movie about a mother, and the combination of those sounded really fun. It sounded like something that would be emotional, but also fantastical.

Yvett Merino: I think one of the things I love about this job is that every film is different. Every film brings new challenges. There were a lot of things on Zootopia 2, even during the recording, that [teach lessons]. Having a cast that's so large, or leading the team, you just learn and file it away. And sometimes it's applicable on the next project, or sometimes it's applicable five projects down.

ScreenRant: Everyone seems to have connected emotionally with the mother-daughter storyline, but I'm wondering what the first moment was that had you like, "Yes, I'm so excited to be doing this"?

Dana Ledoux Miller: What's the first moment? I would say it was actually when Jared called me to say, "What would you say if we had a Disney heroine who was a bit sardonic, had a little bit of an edge, felt like an outsider, and wasn't really sure where she belonged?" I was like, "I'm sorry, have I been typecast?"

Really, from the beginning, I was so excited to not only come in and try to create a world that's an original world, but also to create a Disney heroine who's unafraid to make bold moves. I feel like I relate to that a little bit.

Jared Bush: I have three teenage boys, but they're in this moment where they are questioning themselves. They look to the future, and they don't know what that holds yet. They don't know themselves well enough to know that they're capable of these vast, amazing things.

In this story, that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about a character's potential, and how hard it is to see how far you can go and how high you can fly. As a parent, in this exact moment right now, where I'm having these literal conversations — that was a really important emotional lock-in for me.

ScreenRant: Speaking to that mother-daughter story, we got to see the evolution of the "Grounded" sequence from the first passes to the final result. Was there any other aspect that changed the most from the beginning of the process to the end?

Fawn Veerasunhorn: We talked a lot about whose point of view we were rooting for. We both are parents, so for the longest time, we were siding with Alice a little too much. Anything that tipped into the pairing, we were like, "We understand her. We don't understand Billie quite yet."

We know that Billie is a really great vehicle into understanding who Alice is, so we have to [understand Billie too]. Yes, the daughter is doing some wild, crazy things, but we want to get behind her. How do we do that? That scene highlights the evolution that gets us to be fully behind Billie.

Jared Bush: I think that's the beauty of working at Disney Animation. We're doing that all the time on every single scene. Anything you see, we've done 800 times. Honestly, the luxury of being here is that you have all these bites of the apple.

Without getting into spoiler territory, there are these moments where characters' perspective starts to shift. Those are always the most exciting, but they're really tricky. You have to earn those moments, and you have to make sure that if a character's emotional perspective is changing, you really understand them right before that. So that, when all of a sudden there's this pivot that happens, you're with them. You're surprised with them, and you're feeling the same things that they are.

I would say that there's some pivotal stuff between Billie and Alice that, having gone through this so many different times, it's really exciting to see land.

Ray Conli: I think the emotional evolution of this film has been the most interesting, and that relationship between Billie and Alice is absolutely heart-wrenching at times, joyous at times, and absolutely hilarious at times. That relationship is one we really worked on and made something special.

Dana Ledoux Miller: I would say all of those things are true for me, and that relationship is fundamentally the most important thing.

But I also haven't been able to, before this movie, create a real Disney villain. That was a really fun challenge, but it also is something that changed a lot. It changes a lot as you're writing it, and as you're working with story artists and animators. You're like, "Oh, I have this really strong vision of what this character is and what she's capable of and what she can do."

Then you get someone like Jodie Foster to step into the booth, and suddenly she adds so many new layers. I think [Jared] and I went back and were like, "Not only do we get to create a new Disney villain, we get to give her layers and take her to places that I don't think we've really ever gone before." That was something that was just constantly changing, and it's pretty juicy.

What I love so much is that Jodie was down to play with us and really explore that too. We're experimenting here, changing things constantly — but then you get a great actor in, and it expands what's possible in a really cool way.

Beef Roger & Queen Celeste Are Sure To Win Over Disney Fan Hearts

ScreenRant: Is there any one character you feel closest to now that the movie's coming out?

Jason Hand: I love Beef Roger so much. I'm not quite as much of a recluse dirtbag as he is, but I love that character. He has such a history, and he's so much fun to be around, and I love that. I can be occasionally grumpy, but not quite as grumpy as him.

Fawn Veerasunhorn: Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Beef. I would say that I'm passionate about Alice and representing this character as a mother, especially as we're the same age. A millennial mom should be able to see themselves in her, even though it's presented through her daughter's point of view. It might be a bit rocky in the beginning, but I hope that people warm up to her, get to know who she is, and get behind her.

Ray Conli: You can't help but love Billie because we've all been teenagers, and so we've all gone through that.

But I have to say: Beef Roger. I adore him, and I adore Walton Goggins, who plays him. He's absolutely got such a great sense of humor, but also a really base structure of drama in his performance. It's great.

Yvett Merino: I do love Queen Celeste. I love who she is. I love that she is running her queendom of Hexe and making sure that she's the one who is running it. Jodi Foster does an amazing and very surprising job. We're not used to seeing her in a villain role, but it's really, really great.

Ray Conli: I mean, she is absolutely amazing. She's a two-time Academy Award winner, and it's phenomenal what she brought to this project.

ScreenRant: We also got to see some cameos from iconic Disney characters in the Hexe village. Are there more where that came from, and at what point did they get added?

Ray Conli: It gets sprinkled in all the way through the process. I think everyone will be surprised as they go through. They'll see a little bit of little gems that reflect back to our previous films.

Jason Hand: Yeah, we wanted to have a lot of fun with this movie. As you see more and more footage from this, the whole entire point was to have a blast. There are a couple of cameos, like the ones you're talking about, in there. Billie's dancing with the brooms at one point, so anywhere it felt like it was appropriate and felt like we could have fun, we took the chance.

Fawn Veerasunhorn: There are also cameos of witches. There's a lot more; we really lean in.

Hexed arrives in theaters on November 25.

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  Billie Doe (voice)

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  Queen Celeste (voice)

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  Beef Roger (voice)

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  Alice Doe (voice)