A multi-hyphenate talent with a gravity-defying range of awards — she’s just an Oscar shy of EGOT — Cynthia Erivo is poised to add even more when audiences (and voters) get to see her soar in Wicked: For Good, which hits theaters Nov. 21.
But even she says there’s no way she could have fully prepared for the thunderous impact the Wicked films have had.
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“I think I knew that it would be a life-changing project from the beginning. I just don’t think I quite knew the gravity of, please excuse the pun, of what it would be,” she said in a press conference with journalists on Sunday. “I knew it was something that would challenge me. I knew it was something that would change the way I see my art and increase the love I have for it.”
She added, “This has been the ride of a lifetime.”
Of particular joy for her in the second film was getting to craft her new song, “No Place Like Home,” an experience she calls “delightful.” “Music is like my other language, and so whenever I get the chance to really dive into music, I am in heaven,” she said. Beyond getting to work with [composer] Stephen Schwartz, which she says was “an honor,” she said, “It was really fascinating to discover and mine it for the story that was true to Elphaba, because it’s one thing to sing a new song, and it’s another to be able to make it this version of the characters.”
The new song meant her first opportunity to truly make Elphaba her own. “It wasn’t that I set out on purpose to make the music my own — it’s just that our voices are so different to everyone else’s voices,” she explained, compared to previous Wicked performers. “[Ariana Grande and I] sing the way we sing, and the other Elphabas sing the way they sing, and there’s no way I can mimic or remake or double what has been. So all I can do is use the tool I have to make the sound I make.”
Her process for learning and recording the songs, she said, starts with the lyrics. “They’re the touchstone,” she said. “If you go back to the lyric and you know what it is you’re talking about, what you’re saying, what’s the story you’re trying to tell, then the melody will be informed.”
She pointed to “I’m Not Your Girl,” as an example, which comes after a really intense moment of connection, followed by a moment of reflection — which calls for trepidation. “It’s not so much about just saying the words, it’s now about understanding what actually happened in this moment,” she said.
Asked her proudest moment from the film, she chose “No Good Deed,” since she shot it on her own against a blue screen. “The plinths and fire and rocks… none of that was there to look at. It’s all in the mind,” she said. “So I was really proud of being able to do something that was that big, that grand, and still be able to hone into the feeling the moment.”
She also singled out her duet with Ariana Grande in “For Good.” “I was really proud of the vulnerability that we were able to achieve, because I think that there’s a choice to back away from the hurt and pain that they both have to experience, there’s a choice to sort of avoid it, but we ran headlong into it,” she said.
Given the elaborate production, the two films were shot concurrently, forging a deep bond between the stars and their director, Jon M. Chu, who Erivo described as “playful” and “curious.” “Everybody has their own language when it comes to making the art that they want to make, or playing a character the way they want to play them, and he learned my language,” she said. “That language included doing a take for “sh-ts and giggles,” she said. “So I would exhaust everything and do as much as I can, and then I would do one just to do one. And quite often, that would be the take.”
Working with Chu over the course of two films also allowed her to plumb the depths of the character in a way the musical hadn’t been able to. “I think previously Elphaba has often been thought of as like a really strong character who knows herself and is very, very confident, and I think that we’ve been able to crack open her vulnerability, a softer side of her that hasn’t necessarily been on show before, to reveal the real humanity within,” she said. “We’ve humanized this character, made her really three-dimensional, [shown her as] someone whose heart really beats, who has heartbreak and loss and grief and hurt and pain and love and lust and all of those things and desire, and we’ve been able to make that real.”
She also shared the original one detail she added that fans might have otherwise missed: Elphaba’s freckles. “I wanted to take from the lore of witches, where you get a wart on the nose or on the chin or on a lip,” she said, “so that where you would normally have a wart are beauty spots and freckles. I just put those in because I wanted to take from the idea that perception, again, is everything.”
Erivo said she’s grateful for the impact the character has had on fans, calling it a “privilege” — and has taken away a lesson of her own as well, that the work that she puts in as a performer is not for naught.
“You’ll do whatever you need to do in order to get the story, to tell the story as truthfully as possible, and so you will put yourself through crazy things,” she said. “You will put yourself in a harness. You will be hoisted up into the air. You will do all the training at 3am in the morning. You will turn up and sit in the chair for two and a half hours to be green, head to toe, if you need to be, and you will do all of those things, and it will feel like nothing until you’re done, and you don’t realize it, because you’re in it. And that’s the name of the game. You want to make sure that you can give as much as you can give to tell the story. It’s only when you step away that you think, oh my goodness, that was a lot of work, because now I can see it through someone else’s eyes.”
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