At the age of 37, Cynthia Erivo has already had a richly varied career, winning a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy and channeling Harriet Tubman in “Harriet” and Aretha Franklin in “Genius: Aretha.”
So why does it seem as if she might have been born to play the iconic Wicked Witch of the West in “Wicked,” Jon M. Chu’s musical movie adaptation of author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 “Wizard of Oz” prequel novel and its 2003 Broadway musical?
As Elphaba, the name the witch had before she became known simply as wicked, Erivo uses the film to take a dramatic turn that has landed her both at the top of the box-office charts and in the awards picture. Beyond her renditions of Stephen Schwartz’s beloved “Defying Gravity,” “The Wizard and I,” “I’m Not That Girl” and other numbers, she illuminates a richly textured emotional landscape within the west-bound witch everyone thinks they know. She finds new textures in a character that has been played on stages around the world for the last 21 years.
“I think the thing that I loved about Elphaba, the thing I really wanted to share, is that she has a joyfulness about her, that she has hope, that she can joke and she can laugh and she can smile, and she can have the softer part be the primary part of herself,” Erivo said following a photo shoot and Visionaries conversation with Chu at TheWrap Studio in Los Angeles. “When she walks into that Ozdust ballroom [when she’s invited to a party by her friend Glinda, played by Ariana Grande], she comes down the corner, she’s so hopeful, she’s so excited to be a part of something.
“And I think that sometimes, I want people to see that about me first, as well. Yes, I can be strong and poised and all those things. But I can also be funny and have a laugh and be soft and be joyful. We have all of that in us. We have light and dark, and we have soft and hard. Hopefully people can see the three-dimensional being in front of them.”
Born in London to Nigerian immigrants, Erivo’s path to acting began when she was 11 and appeared as the queen in a musical production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” a serious drama that was not written to be a musical. “I loved the way I could become this queen at 11 years old,” she said. “It felt really fun and expressive.” She stuck with music and drama through school, then went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which launched her onto the British stage, then TV and film.
Her career would include the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” for which she won her Tony, Emmy and Grammy, as well as projects as diverse as “Harriet,” “Genius: Aretha,” “Widows” and “Bad Times at the El Royale.” “I feel really grateful for the opportunity to play such varied people,” she said. “They are similar in that they have wants and needs and hope and loss and all those things, but they’re all very different human beings. It’s nice to be thought of as someone who can do different things and play in different spaces.”
But along the way, she had to acquire the confidence to believe that she could play those roles. “It changed as I got further into [my career],” she said. “At the beginning, it was wanting to prove to others that I was good enough to do what I do. Now, it’s often about proving to myself that I have done enough work to be where I am. I’m hard on myself, and nothing I do is just for the sake of doing it. Everything is considered.”
It makes sense, then, that Erivo would set her sights on Elphaba as a “dream-come-true” project and a mountain worth climbing. She is more than just an iconic musical character: Originator Idina Menzel took home the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical back in 2004, and the part has been the summit of many theater performers’ careers since. It’s also a role that challenged Erivo both practically and emotionally. She said that playing Elphaba almost sent her to a “breaking point,” adding, “I think there’s something quite thrilling in, ‘How much further can I push?’”
It also forced her to navigate things within herself that no previous project had. “I think the thing she taught me was not to be afraid of my insecurities and my vulnerabilities and the things that are usually beneath the surface that I don’t necessarily share with everybody,” Erivo said. “She taught me to allow people in a little more. I can be quite guarded, but I was seeking the hope and joy in her, as well — because you can’t really have the pain without that. You can’t really have the heartbreak without that in this character, which means that I had to open myself up to that, too.”
A Black actress has never played Elphaba as a principal performer on Broadway. There have been stand-ins and understudies over the years, and principal runs in international and touring productions of the show — but never a first-run, mainstage actress on the coveted boards of New York’s Gershwin Theatre.
The thing Elphaba taught me was not to be afraid of my insecurities and my vulnerabilities.
Cynthia Erivo
For a musical that interrogates the roots of race-based prejudice as Elphaba is judged, ostracized and ultimately villainized for the color of her skin, it seems to be a blind spot for the long-running production to not spotlight a Black actress for whom that lived experience may ring a bit truer. Elphaba’s journey in “Wicked” is that of a young woman whose difference literally becomes her power — whose otherness emboldens her fortitude, her resiliency.
Erivo, whose work has invariably highlighted the power and politics of representation across projects, knows the significance of being cast. She is hopeful it “opens up the aperture a bit more” to Broadway’s decision-makers. “There’s space for us,” she said. “We can tell the story, too.”
Reflecting on her rising position in Hollywood as a queer-identifying Black woman who often finds herself in rooms run by white men, it doesn’t take much for Erivo to relate to some of Elphaba’s circumstances and impulses. In her greenness, Elphaba is at first portrayed as slyly defensive, ready to preempt anyone’s disgust or concerns over her appearance with a well-scripted kiss-off: “No I’m not seasick, yes I’ve always been green, no I didn’t eat grass as a child,” she tells Grande’s Galinda and her Shiz University cohorts on Day 1. Later, in her first encounter with Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero, he flirtingly goads, “And the defensiveness, is that a recent development?”
“It’s a protective mechanism to get there before everybody else does,” Erivo said. “You know, you can sometimes walk into a room and assume everybody has a notion about you and what you’ll do and what you’ll bring. I’ve definitely walked into a room and people … My favorite is when a person is like, ‘You’re so much warmer than what I thought you would be.’ Why would you think I would be anything other than warm? There are assumptions that people make, and I understood what that was.”
Erivo used that firsthand understanding of Elphaba’s psyche to map the character’s emotional journey onto the production’s music, from her glimmer of optimism in “The Wizard and I” to her impenetrable rage and determination in “Defying Gravity” upon learning that the Wizard is just a power-hungry conman. “‘I trust your storytelling,’” she said composer Schwartz told her. “‘So just do what you need to do in order to tell the story.’”
“It’s peaks and troughs,” Erivo said. “It rises and falls and rises and falls until we’re on a steady climb upwards. I knew that I wanted to do that because it’s much more thrilling than the other choice, which is just to sing everything as big as possible. That doesn’t tell you the story. There has to be an emotion added to each thing, each phrase, each stanza, whether it’s the laugh at the beginning of ‘The Wizard and I’ or it’s the growl in ‘Defying Gravity,’ there are moments that I allow myself — and Stephen allowed me — to connect to the real emotion of the piece and the emotion of her place in the journey.”
Erivo is now looking ahead to Thanksgiving 2025 and the anticipated arrival of “Wicked: For Good” (newly renamed from “Wicked: Part 2”). So if the first “Wicked” charts Elphaba finding her voice and her strength, what is the actress most looking forward to audiences seeing in the adaptation’s conclusion?
“I think I’m looking forward to people seeing the way she has to channel her rage,” Erivo said. “She’s learned to process hurt and pain and find her voice in it, and I think in the second, she learns about love and rage — what the balance of that is. What happens when it loses balance, and what happens when you find it again?”
This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap magazine. Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
