Interview with Prince Hans aka Santino Fontana |

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***Disclosure: I attended The #DisneyFrozenEvent . My flight, lodgings, and expenses were covered by Disney and myself. All opinions are 100% mine. ***

Santino Fontana is an American stage actor, director, and composer. His Broadway debut was Sunday in the Park with George in 2007. You can catch him now on Broadway in Cinderella and he plays Hans the Prince in Frozen. He sat down to chat with us Mom Bloggers and BEWARE this is filled with *SPOLERS* so if you haven’t yet seen the film (PS WHY NOT?!) then skip this interview and come back. Also, he was asked to sing a few bars and of course he was put on the spot and had to politely say no, BUT he did post this tweet for us:

Dear mommy bloggers @DisneyAnimation today, Sorry I couldn’t sing this morning, will you except this in exchange? http://t.co/FAsTaTSsIe

— Santino Fontana (@SantinoFontana) November 20, 2013

Santino: Hello. Well, this is cool. It’s great.

Q: Your character has a twist that one would not see coming. Did you know it was coming when you first started?
Santino: Yeah. I think I did. Yes, I mean, not initially, not in the audition process, I didn’t. In the audition process, I auditioned for Kristoff when at the time Kristoff was a tour guide in a place called, that was called mistletoe. He was a very naive and non-kind of comedic presence. Then they said they scrapped the movie, and I was like oh no, but I knew Chris liked me. It came back two years later and this time they wanted me to audition for Hans, for the Prince. We didn’t know, at the time, the description was more almost Gastonish, in a way, and I’m saying that what he told you guys what I’d say. Then it changed and then they were aware that they wanted some big twists to come, and then eventually that was part of the audition process. So I knew that would happen, but I didn’t know how.

Q: Did you Do any singing with Kristen?
Santino: Singing is the only thing we did together. We sang it together and then we also sang it (apart)., I’m doing Cinderella on Broadway right now, playing the Prince in that, a very different prince and we ran previews in, I think it was February. We opened in March, so we were doing performances, rehearsals during the day, then performances at night, and then after a show one night, I got on a plane into L.A., met Kristen really for the first time. She was pregnant at the time. We sang the song for like a couple hours, got on a plane, went back and did my show.

Q: Were you singing separately, with headphones?
Santino: We were in different booths. Yeah.

Q: So you weren’t dancing around?
Santino: No, there was no dancing. There was no dancing. There was a lot of like reading to make sure you got the right note and the right lyric, but we were together because that’s hard to sing, but then we also sang it separately after that. So we sang it together and then we sang it separately and then I don’t know which takes they used.

Q: How many hours did you spend on your character?
Santino:That’s what’s so funny… My agent was here last night and they were saying, ’cause every other time I’ve come out to L.A. for Frozen, I’ve had to usually take the red eye back to get back in time to do the show. Today, this is the first, this is also my vacation week from Cinderella. We get a week every six months, and this is my… I know, right? To say it out loud in front of people who don’t know it, it’s like what am I doing? [LAUGHING.] …Agreeing to do that. Yeah, so this is my week of vacation and so it worked out perfectly that I could come here and do this. My agent last night was joking around and I was like this is so much fun. I got to do more of these. And he was like, what is this? Five days of work for you? And I was like yeah. That was it. It was five days, five days of recording and, you know, in five days in a Broadway show you’ve done eight shows, so it’s kind of nutty.