The Snail and the Whale BBC who plays who?

The Christmas TV bonanza is fast approaching and the BBC has announced one of its biggest family entertainment productions, an adaptation of The Snail and the Whale. With a number of great characters and the big names that have voiced previous Julia Donaldson animation specials, here are the details of who plays who.

It will follow up on the success of The Gruffalo, Gruffalo’s Child, The Highway Rat, Room On The Broom, Stick Man and Zog, making it the 7th Christmas production of one of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s books. It tells the story of an adventurous snail that hitches a lift on the back of a great big grey blue humpback whale with a perilous race against time finale.

The book doesn’t really have as many different characters as other stories covered on BBC, so there’s only really the Snail, The Whale and the narrator. Details for who plays each of these are below, along with the teacher, who also gets a bit of a role in the BBC adaptation of The Snail and the Whale.

You can check out the official BBC Twitter page at https://twitter.com/BBC to look out for more on the production.

Snail

The plucky and resourceful Snail will be played by two-time Academy Award nominee Sally Hawkins, who has starred in Vera Drake, Submarine and Tge Shape Of Water. She recently returned to big movie monster action in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and she also played Mary Brown in both Paddington and Paddington 2.

This will be her second voice role for a BBC adaptation of a Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s stories following on from getting to play Bird in Room on the Broom In 2012. However, this will be a much bigger role as one of the two lead characters in The Snail and the Whale, but with her excellent track record for performances it should be one of the best yet.

Whale

The yin to the yang of Sally Hawkins in Rob Brydon who has been given the huge role of the Whale to splash out from the crashing waves of Rest Bay. He’s proven himself as being the perfect comic for little man roles like Uncle Bryn, Kieth in Marion and Geoff, Gryff in The Huntsman: Winter’s War and his epic small man trapped in a box, so it’s going to be fun seeing what he can do with a bit of weight to throw around.

He’s even more familiar with the seasonal films for BBC One having played the Snake in The Gruffalo and Gruffalo’s Child, as well as Cat in Room On The Broom.

Teacher

Adding her voice to the cast list as the Teacher is Cariad Lloyd, who doesn’t have as many big name credits as Brydon and Hawkins. She recently starred in an episode of This Time With Alan Partridge and you might have seen her as a panellist on comedy shows like QI, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Would I Lie To You.

Narrator

Finally, laying the silvery trail of the story will be Dame Diana Rigg following on from the brilliance of her role as Olenna Tyrell in Game Of Thrones. She initially became famous for playing Emma Pee in the British espionage TV show The Avengers and more recently she’s also starred in Detectorists on the BBC and Victoria on ITV.

Her previous work isn’t all that notorious in terms of animated family entertainment as such, but she’s definitely got a wonderful voice that should bring a lot to the BBC adaptation of The Snail and the Whale.

More on who plays who

While that’s all of the who plays who for now, we’re expecting BBC to throw out a few more announcements as we get closer to the winter holiday air date. There aren’t too many other talking parts as such, but there could be some cool cameos in store as the rest of the snail flock. They’ll be one line roles, but the casting could have a lot of fun with the selections, so we’ll update you with more details as they’re announced.

The Snail and the Whale is produced by Magic Light Pictures and you can see more on its animation work at https://www.magiclightpictures.com/productions/.