Spoiler alert! The following post contains major details about the ending of “Wicked: For Good” (in theaters now). Stop reading if you don’t want to know what happens.
Every “Wicked” fan knows that the song “For Good” is emotional terrorism.
But in the new movie musical “Wicked: For Good,” it’s what happens immediately after that will break audiences open.
Toward the end of the film, Glinda (Ariana Grande) travels in secret to the castle where Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is hiding out. Elphaba is exhausted from fighting and ready to surrender, having been shattered by the losses of her lover Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) and sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode). She hands over the Grimmerie to Glinda, asking her to use the book of spells to enact positive change in Oz. And through tears, the longtime friends sing “For Good,” as the witches acknowledge the indelible marks they’ve left on each other’s lives.
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Glinda (Ariana Grande, left) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) say they will always be with each other, “like a handprint on my heart.”
After the song, Elphaba grabs Glinda’s hand and hides her in a closet, assuring her that everything will be all right before saying “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Glinda responds, sobbing. Elphaba closes the closet, and the two women lean their heads against opposite sides of the door, weeping together one last time before Dorothy runs in and throws a (seemingly) lethal bucket of water on our green-skinned heroine.
The gut-wrenching scene is not in the original Broadway musical, and was actually improvised by the actresses.
“Neither one of us knew what we were doing on the other side of the door,” Erivo tells USA TODAY. “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu “just let the camera run. When we had rehearsed that scene, we knew how important it was for them to say those words because you hadn’t heard them say ‘I love you’ to each other. Both of us were very aware that this might be the final time these two women see one another.
Cynthia Erivo, left, Ariana Grande and director Jon M. Chu filming the “For Good” scene in the new “Wicked” movie.
“It was really overwhelming, knowing this was a moment for them both to just let go and grieve,” Erivo adds. “Elphaba has tried to be really strong the entire time, and even when she says, ‘Goodbye, it’s going to be OK,’ she’s still smiling. It’s when she shuts that door that I felt my heart break. It was just really desperately heartbreaking to let go.”
Erivo is grateful to Chu for allowing her and Grande to be so unguarded in that moment: “To have that space to fully release all of the things they’ve been holding onto was really special.”
Initially, the scene was written much closer to how it plays out on stage, screenwriter Winnie Holzman says: “But the girls just went for it and I love what they did there. They’re extraordinary.”
Chu confirms that the witches saying “I love you” was “definitely not scripted.”
After Erivo and Grande finished singing “For Good,” “I didn’t call cut, so they just kept going because they were so present,” Chu recalls. “Suddenly, they were improvising this scene and they said, ‘I love you,’ which was almost meta. On that day, we never planned for the shot of the door in between the two of them. But watching them do it, I was like, ‘We’ve got to do the door shot.’ There’s this separation, and yet they’re connected. It gave me the catharsis I needed in that moment, and I think for our audience, too.
“It was a really beautiful and really real moment,” he adds. “I’m really glad people see it and feel it, because I felt it.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Elphaba, Glinda’s gutting ‘Wicked: For Good’ scene was improvised
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