Working at Disneyland Paris may sound like a fairy-tale job, but behind the costumes, smiles and magic lies a demanding profession built on auditions, dancing, acting and meticulous attention to detail.
Noa Ben, who worked in the park’s character department, told the ynet studio what it takes to land such a role, how Disney’s princesses have changed over the years and what happened when Israeli visitors unexpectedly heard Hebrew from the character standing in front of them.
At Disney, even the language used by performers is part of maintaining the illusion. Ben does not say she “played” a particular princess. Instead, she says she was a “friend” of several characters. “We preserve the magic and don’t really use terms like ‘I was,’” she explained.
So how does someone get such a job in the first place? According to Ben, it starts with an audition. “You need to know how to dance and act,” she said. “There are also a lot of parameters that are less dependent on us. They’re more things the casting people see, things I don’t really know either. It’s very mysterious. You just try, and sometimes it works.”
As Alice in Wonderland
(Photo: Courtesy of Noa Ben)
Aa Wendy from Peter Pan
(Photo: Courtesy of Noa Ben)
For Ben, the appeal of Disney princesses is not limited to children. “People grew up on these stories, so even if they’re adults and suddenly arrive at Disneyland, it still touches them somewhere,” she said. “It’s a memory from the past, and it basically brings all of us back to being children. We all want to live happily ever after, and it’s a kind of escape from reality.”
She said the princesses themselves have also evolved. “They’re more talkative, funnier, they have more personality and you see it more,” Ben said of newer characters. The stories have also broadened beyond romance. “There are relationships between women that aren’t only connected to men. It could be a mother and daughter, it could be sisters. The story isn’t only about the romantic part. There’s more complexity.”
For Ben, though, the role was first and foremost a job, and one she took seriously. “I thought less about the fact that I was a princess and more about how I could do it as well as possible, and how I could make the people who came to meet me feel that they had really met a Disney princess,” she said.
‘They didn’t expect Hebrew to come out of my mouth’
Some of her favorite moments came when she met visitors from Israel. Ben said they often had no idea that the Disney character standing in front of them was Israeli. “I met Israelis who didn’t say they were from Israel, or told me they were from somewhere else, and then I heard them speaking and started talking to them in Hebrew too,” she said. “It was a very big surprise. People didn’t know how to process it,” she said of their reaction. “They didn’t expect Hebrew to come out of my mouth.”
For Ben, those encounters were the highlight of the job. “That was my favorite experience at work, without a doubt, meeting Israelis and making them happy, and letting them see that there is representation and that this is something that’s possible.”
Israeli children, she added, are still every bit as captivated by the princesses. Asked whether they remain enchanted by the characters, she answered immediately: “Absolutely.” Ben said the experience is one she expects to remember for years. “It was a crazy experience,” she said.
And although she first visited Disneyland only as an adult, she has no doubt she will return one day with her own children. “Of course,” she said. “As a child, I was never there. I only got to be there as an adult, but I’ll absolutely go back there with my kids. It will be the most magical thing in the world.”