- Cynthia Erivo has been impressing fans globally with her amazing talent in the adaptation of Wicked
- But the actor has now revealed the ‘huge responsibility’ she felt about taking on one track in particular
- Erivo also opened up about just how long it took the makeup team to paint her skin green for the role of Elphaba
Cynthia Erivo is currently wowing audiences across the world with her portrayal of Elphaba in the movie adaptation of the musical, Wicked.
And as longtime musical theater fans will know, one of the show’s pivotal points comes when Elphaba – who will later become The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West – belts out Defying Gravity at the end of the first act.
Without giving away any spoilers, it is the moment that the character realizes she must go it alone in Oz – and as the Wicked movies have been split into two parts by director Jon M. Chu, it is also the closing number of the first film.
In a chat with Angelina Jolie for Variety’s Actors on Actors series this week, Erivo, 37, revealed she felt a “huge responsibility” while taking on the track.
“I knew there was this huge responsibility, because it’s such a well-known song, and people know it, people love it,” Erivo, who sang everything live on the Wicked set, explained. “But to do it, I really wanted to mean it, you know? Because you can’t say something like ‘time to try defying gravity’, and then to actually fly… The physical work of it was hard because I’m in a harness, and I’m flying and I’m singing at the same time. So many things were happening, and that was new for me, to figure out how my body, my brain, my voice would all sort of come together to work as one.”
Erivo went on, “I felt really proud of being able to figure out that physical, practical side of it. But I think the journey of getting to that moment – not just in the film, but the journey I’ve taken to get to here. Being at drama school at 20, putting myself through drama school, finishing at 23, not getting jobs, not really being seen, not really feeling accepted.
“Feeling very odd, very different, and having to figure out how to make my own way through this, because this business is hard. I also knew that there are so many people who want to feel seen, who want to know that it’s possible to exceed people’s expectations of them, and exceed your own expectations. I kind of, even in that moment, wanted to exceed my own expectations of what I could do.
“And then there’s this other thing that’s playing in my head, like there are so many people on this set right now who have been waiting for this moment in this film in this project, and we’d all worked towards this one part. It’s how we finished shooting, it was the last thing we shot.”
Erivo continued, “So I think I just had to channel several different things: little Cynthia who didn’t know she could do this, who would be here; big Cynthia who wanted to make everyone proud and herself proud.
“I wanted it to feel like the complete package, that it was servicing not just my desires, but the desires of everyone who’d actually come together to make this thing happen. The desires of those who need something to say, ‘you can do anything you put your mind to, even when it’s scary’. I was so ready to do it.”
Cynthia Erivo reveals time it took to ‘greenify’ for Wicked role
Elsewhere in the chat, Erivo opened up about exactly how long it would take to ‘greenify’ her skin, ready to portray Elphaba.
“It would take about two hours and 45 minutes, to four hours, depending on how much we were doing before we got on set,” she told Jolie. “Because it was everything: so the green, which would be a primer, and then the airbrush would be my whole head – if my hair moved either side, you would see a green scalp.
“But there were days where I would have full body, so I was green everywhere – and that would take a long time. And then you add the detail work, so my freckles and my contacts with the eyes. My hands and the inside of my hands, my nails… the whole thing. And I wanted to, because I also wanted to see the transformation. I wanted to see someone green.”
However, because the complete transformation took so long to complete, Erivo explained that there were some members of the cast and crew who had never seen her as anything other than the greenified Elphaba.
“There were people on set who had never seen me out of the green,” she revealed. “So when I would walk on set, that would be the first time they met me as Elphaba, but they wouldn’t have met me as Cynthia at all.
“I loved that because it just added to the experience of her and playing her. I’d never done anything like it. But I love it.”
Where can I watch the Cynthia Erivo and Angelina Jolie Actors on Actors conversation?
You can watch the full conversation between Cynthia Erivo and Angelina Jolie from the series here:
