Jackie Tohn had to let it go after coming up short of landing a role in a movie that became a classic.
The “Nobody Wants This” star shared on TODAY Oct. 20 that she was in the running to voice Elsa in the blockbuster 2013 animated Disney hit “Frozen.” Broadway star Idina Menzel famously lent her voice to the character, singing the iconic “Let It Go” and other songs as the queen with magical ice powers.
Tohn was playing a game called “Nobody Wants to Answer This” with Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones on TODAY when she was asked to name a role she auditioned for that she thought she could’ve done better than the person who landed it.
“I don’t think I could’ve done a better job. I think it would’ve been really different, and I’m saying this for the first time on your show right now, and I’ve nervous to do it,” Tohn said.
“I was up for Elsa in ‘Frozen,’” she continued. “And I don’t think I would’ve done a better job.”
Tohn, 46, recalled her experience auditioning for the role.
“I auditioned and went through and finally was meeting with (then-Disney head of animation) John Lasseter,” she said. “Because it was sort of always Idina, and then they were like, ‘Should we go this way?’ And then they were like, ‘No, we should go with Idina.’”
“Honestly, that was a rough one,” she added.
Menzel shared how she landed the role in a 2023 oral history of the making of “Frozen” in Vanity Fair. She had previously auditioned for the animated Disney movie “Tangled.”
“I went in for ‘Tangled’ and put my voice down,” Menzel said. “I didn’t get it because I fell between the cracks. My age was wrong to be either the evil mom or Rapunzel. So then, the casting director admittedly bootlegged that recording of me and kept it on her phone for a long time. We knew that they were going to be casting for this new movie they were working on. And so she talked me up, and played my little recording from ‘Tangled.’”
Kristen Bell, who voices Anna in “Frozen,” joined with Menzel to sing the Bette Midler song “Wind Beneath My Wings” during the audition process, director Jennifer Lee told Vanity Fair.
“It was actually Kristen’s idea to do ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ as a duet,” Menzel said. “We learned that in my house at the piano and then figured out what our little harmonies would be. And then we sat around John Lasseter, each of us, and we read through the script and then sang the song together. And that’s how we got the job.”
Though they didn’t end up working together on “Frozen,” Tohn and Bell are longtime friends who now share the screen in “Nobody Wants This.” Bell stars as Joanne, an agnostic woman navigating her relationship with rabbi Noah, played by Adam Brody.
