The stars of the new movie reflect on their long ride together, getting through Covid and the actors’ strike, and avoiding “playing to the green.”
“Excuse me,” Ariana Grande said, flagging down an imaginary waiter. “May we have 1 million tissues please?”
It was midway through the fittingly witchy month of October, and Grande and Cynthia Erivo had convened at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles to discuss their new film Wicked, adapted from the long-running Broadway musical. With emotions riding high before its November 22 release, both women teared up frequently while talking about what the movie means to them.
On set, things had been no less emotional. “The tears would fall every single time,” Erivo said as she recounted shooting a fraught dance sequence with her co-star. “I didn’t have to try for them, they were always there.”
“And I’d catch them,” Grande added.
Wicked functions as a revisionist prequel to The Wizard of Oz, with director Jon M. Chu’s film following Erivo’s green-skinned Elphaba long before she becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. As a young woman at Shiz University, Elphaba is forced to bunk with Grande’s Glinda, a rival-turned-friend who plots to make over her outcast roommate during the fizzy musical number Popular.
But as Elphaba learns the dark secrets that undergird Oz’s Emerald City, the disillusioned young witch finally steps into her own power and belts Defying Gravity, the showstopper that, onstage, is meant to bring down the curtain on the first act. On screen, the song serves as the climax of the 2½-hour movie: The rest of the story is saved for Wicked Part Two, which was shot in tandem with the first film and is slated for release next November.
Though there’s tremendous pomp to the production, it was important to Erivo – a Tony winner in 2016 for The Color Purple and a nominee at the 2020 Oscars for Harriet – to deliver an intimate, human-size performance as Elphaba. “I had no intention of playing to the green,” she said. “I wanted people to see her inner life.”
Better known for her pop-music career, Grande was just as determined to upend expectations, shedding her trademark high ponytail and changing the pitch of her voice to fully commit to her character’s effervescence. “It was really important to erase as much of myself as possible so that they could just be looking at Glinda,” she said.
Both women are 5ft 1 vocal powerhouses – Grande joked that when they were first introduced, “We were both quite shocked that we had finally met someone the same size” – and the bond forged between them during the film’s supersize shoot was more than evident during our interview. Merely meeting the other’s gaze could make them both misty, and when they discussed wrapping the film, both women once again began to cry.
“I can’t even deal with it,” Erivo said, laughing.
Embarrassed, Grande started to crawl under the table. “I’m going away!” she said.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: When you learned the other one had been cast, what was your reaction?
Cynthia Erivo: Absolutely no surprise whatsoever.
Ariana Grande: I said, “Thank God.”
Erivo: Thank goodness, because it was not the two ladies that I was auditioning with.
Grande: Oh my God!
Q: Cynthia, you’ve said you didn’t think you’d be considered for this movie. Why not?
Erivo: Historically, Black women have never really been seen for the role. If they have, they haven’t gotten the role, and if they do, they usually are the alternate or first cover. There’s only one woman I know on record that has done it on the West End. So I just didn’t think they were looking for me.
Q: Why do you think so few Black women have been seen for the role?
Erivo: I don’t know. Maybe it’s a symptom of the time when it was made.
Q: Ariana, did you dream that your career might intersect with Wicked somehow?
Grande: Absolutely, I thought that at 10 years old. I started on Broadway, and I am so thankful for the ways in which my career took pivots and pop became my main thing, but I also think my soul deeply misses musical theatre and comedy. So as soon as I got murmurs of the fact that it could possibly be turning into a film, all I wanted was a chance to audition.
Some members of my team at the time were like, “You shouldn’t even have to audition,” and I was like, “You don’t understand, of course I have to. This is something that has to be earned.” I have so much to prove, and I threw myself at it in every way that I could.
Q: When you were auditioning for the film, did you know it would be split into two parts?
Erivo: Not until much later.
Grande: That was kind of a surprise, but I was thrilled. We really get the chance to ground and humanise these characters in a new way.
Q: How fully did Wicked become your life when you started filming in 2022?
Grande: I personally was pretty distant when I was on set.
Erivo: I got told off by my best friend. We were shooting in London and he was like, “I have not seen you. You have been here for six months!” It really was “head down, let’s do this only”.
Grande: There were not many moments at all when she wasn’t green and my tattoos weren’t covered and we weren’t in these corsets and costumes.
Erivo: And if there was time, we were not well. There was one time when I got Covid, there was another time when she got Covid.
Grande: We only got sick once each, but both were before some of the most important works of the whole movie – mine was the week before Popular. I came to set with a mask on my final days of recovery to learn the hallway finale, and no one liked this joke but I loved it so I’ll tell it: We were in the dorm room together and I sang in her ear, “Positive, you’re going to be positive!” But I wasn’t positive anymore, don’t worry! I took the test.
Erivo: I got Covid the week before I shot Defying Gravity. It was literally like, “Sit down, Cynthia, not yet.”
Q: Your characters room together in the movie. How closely did you stick together while making it?
Grande: Oh God, very. Not only because we were in most of the same scenes but also between them, I was at your house, you were at my house.
Erivo: We got many tattoos together.
Grande: Yes. We went shopping, we went for a walk in the Heath.
Erivo: That was a lovely day, actually.
Grande: And we both were wearing not walk-friendly shoes.
Erivo: The worst shoes ever. What’s wrong with us?
Grande: But I think that was one of my most cherished parts of this experience: I felt held and like I had a friend every step of the way. I’m really proud of us for how genuinely we took care of each other throughout this whole time.
Erivo: I’m glad it was us.
Q: What have each of you pulled from the other?
Grande: I feel really inspired by her fierce ability to be truthful and protect herself. Just by being around her, I have become more of an ally to myself when I used to do a lot of self-abandoning, and I really do credit that to our friendship. (Tearing up) Whoa, I literally promised myself in the car I wasn’t going to do this. Through spending this time with her and also with a character that believes in herself, I feel like I’ve been able to heal certain parts of myself that were in deep need of having a friend like Cynthia and a friend like Glinda.
Q: In the past, you felt like more of a people-pleaser?
Grande: Oh yeah, absolutely. Someone would punch me in the face and I’d say, “I’m sorry.” I’m being silly, I’m doing a bit, but yeah, I had trouble listening to the voices that I knew were true for fear of being judged. And I think that it’s a really beautiful thing to overcome.
Erivo: I don’t know if she knows, but she’s definitely changed my life. I think it was one of the first times a person looked at me and just was happy with what was there. I would tell her about what I wanted for myself as a musician and she just believed it, I think more than I did. I don’t think it was up until I met her that I was like, “Oh, I think I can have what I want in this lifetime, and I can have it in my way.”
She taught me to handle this crazy beast that is emerging success, because I’ve had a measure of it but this is new. She’s really held my hand all the way through it and wants it for me just as much as I want for myself.
Q: The actors’ strike last summer paused production for several months. After such an intense production, what was it like to have that time away?
Erivo: At first, it felt like an interruption, and then as it went on, it felt like the rest we needed. We’d worked ourselves to the bone. I was really grateful because the next thing that we had to do (until the strike happened) was Defying Gravity, and it felt like the universe going, “You need your full strength to do this.” We’d done a lot, but that needed everything.
Grande: It was funny though because no matter how much time passed, the second we got back into those clothes, the characters were right there with us. I don’t think they ever left us, really. Even though we were technically resting, we weren’t ready to fully release because we knew how much was still ahead.
Q: Ariana, you use your full name in this, Ariana Grande-Butera.
Grande: I do.
Why did you want to be listed in the credits that way?
Grande: (Tears up) Oh my God, I just stopped crying. Well, I feel like I truly came home to myself in a lot of ways during the filming of this movie, and it was a nice gesture to portray that in the credits by using my full name. That was the name of the little girl who saw Wicked 20 years ago, and I feel like in a lot of ways I grabbed her hand and said “Let’s go”.
Q: When you finally wrapped as these characters, what was the feeling?
Erivo: I was devastated.
Grande: The whole day was a nightmare. We cried every minute, every hour. We both were in a horrible state for a few days.
Erivo: Yeah, it was really hard to let them go.
Grande: I don’t think we ever truly, fully will. I think we both needed them the way that they needed each other.
Erivo: I still fiercely love her.
Grande: Me, too. We brought our corsets home and our shoes and our wands. I still have all of my wigs.
Erivo: Characters like this don’t come along very often, they just don’t. So it’s a real privilege to be able to play these women because they’re so much more than just iconography. You can help people understand –
Grande: Humanness.
Erivo: Yeah. And hurt and love and pain. And the grey areas that we all have.
Grande: Especially in today’s culture, when there’s a constant erasure of nuance and humanness and feelings, it’s so important to have these characters and this story to remind people that change is possible. We can choose to be good, and we can be wrong.
Erivo: We hold spaces for all of those things, and it’s OK. We don’t all have to be the same, but we can still be able to understand one another in our differences, and that’s what these women want to do.
Q: You’ve been working on this film for years, and now it’s finally coming out. How does that feel?
Erivo: Very crazy. It has been a long ride.
Grande: You said it was going to fly.
Erivo: It did, in a way. Time moves, doesn’t it?
Grande: A little too quickly. We were in the Wizard’s chamber two years ago and I said, “I’m so thankful we have so much time ahead with each other.” And she said, “We’re going to blink and it’s going to be May.” And I said, “No, no. Don’t say that.”
Q: You still have a second film coming, at least.
Erivo: We do, and that’ll be here tomorrow, too.
Q: Decades from now, if people consider Elphaba and Glinda to be your signature roles, would you embrace that?
Grande: Thankfully, with open arms. Oh my God!
Erivo: What a beautiful thing.
Grande: (Crying) Why have you done this to us?
Erivo: It’s really cool. And not to make it constantly about this, but it is a huge thing: The lore of Oz was very closed to girls who looked like me, and now I’m the Wicked Witch of the West. I think the doors are very open now, which is wonderful.
Wicked is in NZ cinemas from November 21.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Dana Scruggs
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES