My first glimpse at the, let’s say, unique way Kimmy Gatewood approaches making TV shows and movies comes when, just seconds into our Zoom conversation, she pops up from her chair and hurries to the wall behind her. With all the showmanship of one of The Price Is Right’s “Barker’s Beauties,” she demonstrates that the bookshelf is actually a secret door.
“It has all my blazers,” she says, excitedly swanning her arm across them. “What you gotta do is just go to Magic Castle and be like, ‘Now I have to do everything in my home like this.”
A performer and director who helmed the new sequel Descendants: Wicked Wonderland for Disney, Gatewood’s affinity for Los Angeles’ members-only magicians’ clubhouse and, as she’d later tell me, the skill of illusions and sleights of hand track, considering her eclectic career. When you scan her biography and résumé, it starts to seem like you’re pulling an endless stream of random, cool things from one of those bottomless magic hats.
She got her start in New York as a member of The Apple Sisters, a musical comedy trio styled after the popular harmonizing 1940s radio singing acts. After a critically acclaimed appearance at the 2008 Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, the group moved to Los Angeles and, along with fellow member Rebekka Johnson, Gatewood was cast on Netflix’s female wrestling series GLOW.
After that ended, she began directing, with credits that include universally beloved institutions and adaptations like Sesame Street, The Muppets, and The Baby-Sitters Club, as well as series with feverishly passionate fanbases like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Girls5eva, and Ghosts. Now she’s the steward of Disney’s blockbuster kids-and-teens franchise, Descendants, the current generation’s answer to defining cultural touchstones like High School Musical and Camp Rock.
“I like to tell stories about underdogs and identity,” Gatewood says, attempting to find a throughline between those various ventures. “I’m more likely to say yes to something and then dive into the deep than overthink it, and then the moment’s passed.”
Just before we talk, for example, her Girls5eva collaborator, Sara Bareilles, who starred on the series, reached out to ask Gatewood, who had just had a root canal, to direct her new music video this week. Even though she had the Descendants: Wicked Wonderland premiere and all the hoopla that came with it to contend with, Gatewood said yes.
“When Sara puts up the Bareilles Signal, just like the Bat Signal, you go,” she says. (One imagines the Bareilles Signal is the Bat Signal, but the bat is crying. You know, because he was just listening to Sara Bareilles songs.)
It cannot be overstated how massive a deal the Descendants movies are for today’s adolescents, preteens, and the people who love them. Or, heck, for people of any age who just like Disney and musicals. I liken the movies to The Avengers, but for Disney characters. It involves the same fan-servicing mashing-up of storylines and universes. Gatewood more classily likens it to how the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods remixes classic fairy tales.