The answer, he continued, lay in the bond between the leads. “That lock-in between Alice and Billie, to me, was our North Star,” Bush said. “Once we really dug in on why they had their issues and where their communication lines were not as clear as they could be, that became fun for us as we were trying to figure out their dynamic.”
While Hexed is comedic and fantastical, it’s grounded in genuine emotion — a delicate combination that Ledoux Miller said was central to the writing process.
“We’re here to create Disney magic, where people are going to laugh and they’re going to feel something,” she said. “As long as we’re tracking that, then that’s our North Star. We’re having fun together, and that’s where the great writing comes in.”
Billie, by design, is a character who refuses to stay inside the lines.
“Billie is the type of character that keeps pushing against the limitation,” said Veerasunthorn. “We want to present that as aspirational. We wish we could be her.”
Yet, in the early days, the filmmakers found themselves rooting for Alice.
“Because we’re both parents, we found ourselves siding with Alice quite a bit,” Veerasunthorn said. “’Maybe this is her story instead of Billie’s.’” Ultimately, they decided to tell the story from Billie’s perspective, which meant remembering how they felt as teenagers so that audiences would be able to “understand Billie deeply.”
Still, Hand said the filmmakers drew on their own experiences as parents to tell Billie’s story. “As you grow up, the experiences you have in your own life influence the way that you teach your children,” he said. “There are reasons. For Billie to discover what those reasons are, why Alice chose the things she chose, is really fascinating. It’s something we can all relate to in our own lives — finding out something about your parents you maybe didn’t know, like what they wanted to do but never chase. And that makes this a very human story in a very fantastical world.”