Music icon Bono and writer-director Garth Jennings are featured in a new episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Behind the Screen, during which they discuss Universal and Illumination Entertainment’s upcoming animated feature Sing 2 and the power of music.
The sequel to Jennings’ 2016 crowd-pleaser features U2 classics like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and a new original song from the band, titled “Your Song Saved My Life.”
The film, which hits theaters Dec. 22, has a voice cast that includes return players Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansson. In his first role in an animated film, Bono plays Clay Calloway, a reclusive rock star who has stopped singing.
In the podcast, Jennings says he’d already started writing Sing 2 when he first talked with Bono about the project, but Clay’s character wasn’t fully fleshed out. What was clear to Jennings was that Clay had to be a lion: “A legendary, epic character … the most magnificent creature. … The goal was to find a way to touch him enough so that he would come back and re-engage with the world he’d left behind.” (THR)