You’ll Never Look at Beauty and the Beast the Same After Seeing Dan Stevens Before CGI

How on earth did Emma Watson keep a straight face?

The Internet has pretty much exploded after behind-the-scenes footage of Watson and Dan Stevens‘ scenes from their blockbuster hit, Beauty and the Beast, got leaked. The scenes, which quickly became memes, reveal Belle in her iconic yellow ball gown being escorted to her romantic night in the castle by a very odd-looking beast. 

And by odd, that means Stevens was decked out in a bulbous motion-capture Lycra suit (compete with stilt-type contraptions on his feet) and very seriously attempting to walk down the castle stairs. Maybe the movie should have been called Beauty and the Guy in the Puffy CGI Suit?

This certainly doesn’t look like any fairy tale we’ve ever seen before! Be our guest and take a look at some of these awesome memes…

In a behind-the-scenes interview, which the memes were taken from, filmmakers explain that in order to make Stevens look as Beastly as possible, his CGI suit was decked out with stilts and extra padding, which to a viewer looks more like a crash-test dummy than a fearsome, yet lovable creature. 

Stevens said, “Puppeteering the suit to the motion capture was an ordeal for my calf muscles alone, let alone the whole body, just to kind of manipulate it.”

The film’s director Bill Condon praised the actor for this hard work.

“I really stood in awe of Dan,” Condon said. “Not only did he conquer the technology, but he had fun with it. I always said, we could get everything else in this movie right, but if we didn’t get a beast that people believed in, then it wouldn’t work.”

But it definitely did work…

The live-action adaptation of the beloved animated Disney classic topped the $900 million mark at the worldwide box office in its first month. As of April it has surpassed the $1 billion box office mark.