The Girls of "Aquamarine"

In Theaters March 3

Okay parents, get ready to take your daughters to the movies. Aquamarine has everything your tweeners will eat up: best friends, cute guys, hip music and mermaids on the beach. Teen music sensation JoJo and [i]Unfabulous[/i]’s Emma Roberts play best friends on their last summer weekend together. Sara Paxton of [i]Darcy’s Wild Life[/i] plays the mermaid Aquamarine, who enlists their help to find true love before she’s forced into an arranged marriage by her sea god father. [p] For JoJo, acting for the first time was full of surprises. “There is a different responsibility that you have. As an artist, you can be whoever you want to be. You can be yourself, or portray yourself any way you choose. When you’re playing a role, you obviously have to play that person who is different from yourself. I took that very seriously and I tried to make my character of Hailey different from who I am. I’m not shy and she was kind of uncomfortable with herself. She covered up with baggy clothes and I’m not like that.”

Paxton and Roberts also have music careers, and they perform songs for the film’s soundtrack. On the set together, they avoided talking shop. “For fun, we were just like kidding around,” said Paxton. “Like not for real singing, but we would make up raps and stuff. We were constantly just joking around nonstop. They would tell us to be quiet sometimes.”

The three are all fans of each other’s music, even when they don’t know who sang what. “Sara has the song that’s playing in the previews called ‘Connected,’” said Roberts. “I actually called her when I heard it and I said ‘Don’t you just love that song!’ And she was like ‘That’s my song.’ ‘Are you serious? I want it.’”

JoJo decided not to provide a song for Aquamarine. “I don’t want you to think it’s because I think I’m too good because I’m so not too good. I wanted to just keep my acting and singing separate. That’s why I chose not to play a singer in films or sing in films.”

She also used her full name as her acting credit. “Only in acting I’m going by Joanna JoJo Levesque. In singing, just JoJo. But the reason we wanted to go with JoJo Levesque is most people know me as JoJo so people that are familiar with me would still be like ‘oh, that’s JoJo.’”

The adventure of Aquamarine spans both land and sea, as all three girls got in the water at some point. Roberts’ character, Claire, is afraid of the water because her parents died in a sailing accident. Pretending to hate the water was a major acting stretch for Roberts.

“I love the water,” she said. “It was so difficult because we were in that tank and it was so much fun. I would always be swimming around, having a great time, and the director, Liz, would come to me and say ‘You look like you’re having way too much fun over there. You need to look like you’re struggling out there.’ So I had to slow down and do the doggy paddle really slow.’

Paxton learned to swim with a mermaid tail on. It wasn’t that hard, since she’d been practicing all her life. “I was obsessed with mermaids when I was little and I watched Little Mermaid like every day,” Paxton said. “It still makes me cry. I’m not going to lie about that. When I was little, I used to go in the pool and tie my legs together and practice swimming and I was like, ‘Daddy, look, I’m Shelly the mermaid.’ I would just pretend.” Kids, don’t try that at home. “I happened to be an expert at it. Experts only should try that. Like me. But no, people, don’t do that.”

JoJo got to ride on the fin of real dolphins as they carry her out to a buoy. There’s no CGI there. “They were real dolphins and we did it at Sea World then, with movie magic, they put them in looking like it was the ocean,” Jojo said. “They were real and I was really scared because I’m kind of afraid of animals actually. I’m afraid of animals, I’m afraid of sea creatures and things that could potentially bite me. My dad’s friend had her arm bit by a dolphin and, ever since then, I was so frightened. Of all of the girls, I was the one that had to ride the dolphin. I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to bite my neck and I’m gonna die. I’m gonna bleed!’ Thank God, they were nice but I took it really emotionally. I was really scared. We had no problems and the trainers were really nice and eased me into it.”

As Hailey and Claire try to teach Aquamarine how to attract the hottest guy on the beach, their friendship is put to the test. Hailey is leaving for Australia with her mom at the end of Labor Day weekend. JoJo could feel Hailey’s pain.

“I’ve moved a lot,” she said. “I have three best friends, actually. It was never like that before. I always had one best friend. But now I have three people that are the most important people in my life and I have to leave them constantly. My best friend since we were eight moved to Florida after I moved to California for seven months so we were very far away from each other. Then I moved back to Boston. It’s hard but we keep in touch through phone and we still have that connection of friendship.”

Roberts counts herself fortunate that she’s never faced such a crisis. “I’ve moved around schools a lot, but we’re still in LA and we all hang out. Luckily, I’ve never had to move away from any of my really good friends because I don’t know what’d I’d do. I’d be really sad.”

Paxton feels like she’s always the one leaving her friends either to change schools or move. “Luckily, I have the same group of best friends since we were like 10. We all lived pretty close and I had to switch schools and that was like big drama that I was leaving the school and everything, but we’re all still best friends. So that’s good.”

Now, the three actress/singers count each other among their best friends for life. “I think that’s one of the most special things that came out of this film is that we got two other awesome friends,” said Jojo. “ It was magical. I just love that and I take that off set. I was just with them last night after interviews. I was in Sara’s room until two o’clock last night just talking. It was really good.”

Paxton and Roberts are practically neighbors in real life. Roberts revealed, “We had never met each other before and we were in Australia and we were like ‘Where do you live?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, I live like five minutes from there.’ And I was like ‘No way!’”

That means everyone’s on call for each other if they need support. “We constantly keep in touch,” said Paxton. “We help each other with guy problems and stuff like that and we’ve just really been keeping in touch. And on set, we hung out nonstop because when we were living in the same apartment complex, we worked together every day for three months and it’s a good thing that we all got along so well because we literally were seeing each other every second of the day so it was a really good thing we were really close.”

Aquamarine opens March 3.