“Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo slammed a fan-edit of the film’s poster on Wednesday, calling it “deeply hurtful.”
On Tuesday, a TikTok user under the name Ferlozar posted a video with on-screen text reading “Fixing the Wicked movie poster,” alongside a caption of “much better.” The footage itself showed the user taking advantage of photoshop tools to make the Universal film poster more closely resemble the original poster that was used for the musical’s Playbills.
The main edit to the poster involved hiding Erivo’s eyes and much of her face to more closely mimic the Broadway poster. Her lips are edited to be red and her eyes are hidden under the brim of her hat. Noticeably, the video does not include an edit to Grande’s outfit or hair, which in the original poster, is all white.
The fan edit quickly went viral, with nearly seven million views on TikTok as of this writing. A separate fan account reposted the finished product on Instagram, and that’s where Erivo took notice.
“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful Ai [sic] of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your ***** green,’” Erivo wrote in a post to her story. “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
She went on to note that the original poster wasn’t even based on real actors, but was always just an illustration, and explained why the poster for the “Wicked” movie purposefully chose to show Elphaba’s face.
“I am a real life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer …because without words we communicate with our eyes,” she said.
“Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”
As of this writing, Erivo’s costar Ariana Grande had not publicly addressed the new poster.
See the official version of the “Wicked” poster below.
“Wicked” hits theaters on Nov. 22.
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