From Wicked to Rada - is there anything Cynthia Erivo can’t do?

Cynthia Erivo: “I’m still learning how to compartmentalise and leave characters once I’m done with them.” Photo / AP

The British star is only an Oscar away from winning the ultimate accolade, an EGOT. She talks about starring in the $210 million film musical, shaping young actors, and the toll of her new movie Drift.

Cynthia Erivo has always been a runner. “The 100m was my favourite at school and I’ve done a couple of marathons,” the south London actress says from her home in Los Angeles, her nose ring glinting. She is cinema’s greatest sprinter since Tom Cruise, having streaked across the screen as a beautician-turned-robber in Steve McQueen’s Widows, her movie debut.

But now running has a very different role. Off-screen, jogging helps her to escape the characters she plays, who are often weighed down by trauma. Celie in The Color Purple was raped by her father; Aretha Franklin, whom she played in the mini-series Genius: Aretha, lost her mother as a child and became a mother herself at 12; Harriet Tubman, the slave turned abolitionist whom she played in Harriet, was treated so brutally that Erivo has said she had a “mini breakdown” after playing her. Therapy helped, “but I’m still learning how to compartmentalise and leave those characters once I’m done with them”, she says. “Some of them cling on.”

Erivo felt the need to run quite a bit while shooting her new film, Drift, in Greece. Her character, Jacqueline, has fled civil war in Liberia and come to an unnamed Greek island. By day she poses as a tourist; by night she sleeps in a cave, washing her one pair of underwear and sleeping on a sack of plastic bottles. Flashbacks reveal that she is the daughter of a Liberian politician, but we don’t see the full extent of what she endured until later. That sequence, in which she is dragged across the floor of her family home, was “really hard”, she says. “Your body can’t tell that the panic isn’t real.”

Erivo appears to be annoyingly good at everything: running, acting, singing. At 37 she is three quarters of the way to an Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), having won a Tony for best actress in a musical for The Color Purple on Broadway, a Grammy for the cast album of the same show and an Emmy for a TV performance of one of its songs. She just needs an Oscar and has been nominated for two: best actress for Harriet and best song for its theme song, Stand Up. She has just finished Wicked, a lavish two-film adaptation of the stage musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, in which she stars as green-skinned Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and was recently appointed vice-president of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), a serious undertaking considering its reputation is in dire straits.

Busy, then, although her turn in Drift is about stillness. “Jacqueline was trying to live through every day and hold on to her dignity,” she says. The fact that the character is from a privileged background is important, she thinks — we tend to assume that refugees are poor and uneducated.

Cynthia Erivo in Drift.

There was also a family echo — Erivo’s Nigerian mother was caught up in the Biafran civil war of 1967-70 as a teenager before coming to London. “She, her sisters and their mother just had to run. In a way this movie serves as an ode to my mother and the will to survive. There’s something special that Jacqueline’s made of, and my mum’s made of that too.”

It’s a leap from the tiny Drift to Wicked, with its budget north of £100 million ($210 million), although Elphaba, like Jacqueline, is “lonely and isolated”. Enrolling at Shiz University — think Hogwarts with jazz hands — she is shunned until she is befriended by the popular Glinda, played by the singer Ariana Grande. The emerald paint — she had her own shade, Cynthia’s Green — was airbrushed on every morning, taking three and half hours for the whole body. The subtext of Elphaba’s green skin doesn’t need labouring and Erivo, as a bisexual black Brit in Hollywood, knows more than many about standing out. She came out as bisexual in 2022, saying: “It’s come much later to me now, and it’s just wonderful now to be me.”

With Ariana Grande in Wicked.

Grande has done much less acting than Erivo has singing, but she is “so quick on her feet”, Erivo says. “Her improvisation skills are incredible.” The highlight for her was Defying Gravity, Wicked’s show-stopping tune, which she performed flying through the air in a harness.

“It was one of the wildest experiences of my life,” she says. “When you’re singing you need to be able to bear down into the ground” — tricky in mid-air — so a coach helped her to achieve “invisible grounding”. Sounds like witchcraft. “Once you get it, it’s thrilling,” she says. “There’s nothing like doing a huge loop-the-loop and singing at the same time, knowing that the note is steady.”

Besides movies, Erivo has enough on her plate with her new role at Rada, her alma mater. It’s some achievement for a woman who, when first urged to apply there as a student, said: “What’s Rada?” The institution has been accused of elitism, bullying and discrimination, with the actress Daisy May Cooper claiming that she and other students were encouraged to talk about rapes in lessons.

Once, a fellow student lost their voice before a show and Erivo was asked to sing behind a curtain while the other person lip-synced on stage. “It still makes me feel a little bit yuck,” she said in 2019.

Erivo was one of only four people of colour admitted in her year and struggled to get lead roles. So agreeing to become vice-president of the place was a big decision. Diversity is one thing that’s “got better in recent years”, she says, “but there’s always work to be done”. She and David Harewood (Rada’s president) wholly deserve their roles, but the appointment of two state-educated people of colour is also good PR by an organisation keen to rescue its reputation. Erivo “asked them to make sure [the appointment] wasn’t for vanity purposes”. She is “making sure [students] have more support when they graduate — it can be really daunting” and “finding the right plays for students to embrace. We love Shakespeare, but what else can be interesting?”

The march to world domination continues. Could there be a chink in Erivo’s armour, though: an immunity to the charms of the northeast? On NBC TV in America in 2022 she talked about British provincial cities. Manchester is “incredible because it feels like London”, she said, whereas “you go to Sunderland and you’re like, ‘Where the f*** am I?’” The clip went viral; some lambasted her, others saw it as light-hearted. I think the latter and expect her to laugh it off when I mention it. Instead she goes silent for a few seconds and says: “Do you wanna move on?”

On we go to Prima Facie, the play about a female lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault and is then assaulted herself. Jodie Comer won an Olivier and a Tony for it, playing all the roles, and it will soon become a film starring Erivo. “Because we’re doing a movie I don’t have to do all of the characters,” she says. “We’re just expanding the world — that’s the nature of what film is. Now you get to meet those characters that Jodie so beautifully gave us.”

Written by: Ed Potton

© The Times of London