Obviously, we work a lot in the fairy- tale space and, often, people think of these worlds as European and Caucasian. We work hard to honor what is timeless about these stories but also to re-imagine them. Sometimes it's telling a traditional European tale in a new way with new faces and sometimes it's telling stories from other parts of the world in a modern way. Celebrating other cultures is one of the things that excited us about Aladdin and Mulan.

For Aladdin (out May 24), we looked in more than 15 regions, including places like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Egypt and Morocco. Randi Hiller, who heads up casting for our live-action group, was supervising this massive network of casting directors all over the world. Mena Massoud, who is our Aladdin, was born in Egypt. Marwan Kenzari, our Jafar, was born in the Netherlands and is of Tunisian ethnicity. Navid Negahban, who plays the sultan, is Iranian. Nasim Pedrad, who plays Jasmine's best friend, was born in Iran and raised in the U.S.

In the world of social media, there tends to be a lot of conversation with every casting choice. In the case of the casting of Billy Magnussen [as Prince Anders], the fact that everyone immediately assumed, "Here comes your classic Caucasian romantic lead," couldn't have been further from the truth of what we were up to. With love and respect to Billy, we knew his screen time and we knew what function his role played — Billy being fully in on the joke — which was to poke fun at the classic Western European prince. It's kind of a gotcha moment. He's onscreen for perhaps four or five minutes.

In the case of Mulan (2020), it is cast with entirely actors of Chinese ethnicity (with the exception of two Middle-Eastern actors in supporting roles), and many Chinese nationals. There is not a Caucasian face in the movie. The process was fascinating. The infrastructure of agents, managers and lawyers isn't the same in China. So our people learned new skills in terms of hiring Chinese stars, of negotiating in China. We brought on a legendary Chinese producer named Bill Kong to help us navigate. These Chinese stars are really, really busy with their own big franchises and TV series in China, a robust market in and of itself. The baseline from which we're operating is getting bigger and broader, and we're going to continue to do that.