In making “Wicked” and “Wicked: For Good,” director Jon M. Chu knew he always wanted to expand the stories of both Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) beyond the Broadway musical, and shooting two movies at the same time allowed him to do that.
For Glinda, Chu wanted to explore questions like, when does she hesitate about doing anything? When does she have another opportunity? When does the world shatter around her? And, most important, when is she worthy of magic?
That expansive journey was always part of the plan, and so “Wicked: For Good” really dives into the core of who Glinda is.
The film, which was snubbed by the Oscars but has earned nominations from the Actor Awards (Grande) and the crafts guilds, puts Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship to the test and explores how the consequences of their actions will change all of Oz.
In the film, Elphaba is now in exile. The Yellow Brick Road is being built by the animals of Oz. Glinda has become a puppet of the Wizard’s (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible’s (Michelle Yeoh) propaganda, greeting her fellow Ozians with the song “Thank Goodness/I Couldn’t Be Happier.”
On the surface, she’s got her fiancé Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) by her side, she’s popular and she appears to be happy.
But is she really? Grande spent five years with Glinda, developing her and understanding her. Grande says that when we first meet Glinda, “she’s gotten everything that she has ever wanted, but she feels really empty, and there’s a lot of denial and performance happening.”
Everything in the film is about the decisions these characters have made. “I think my favorite thing about her is the choice and the consequence, the choice and the consequence throughout the course of both films,” says Grande. “I wanted to make sure that you could track her growth. That growth being about someone who thinks she wants power, but she really wants magic, and she really, truly does want to be good.”
Grande collaborated with Chu and the artisans of the film to ensure the character did have an arc that showed her internal conflict and that growth. Above all, it was important to humanize Glinda.
She points to the scene when Glinda gives Elphaba the black hat in their dorm room as one of many moments in “Wicked” meant to establish Glinda’s goodness, which is buried under layers of superficial kindness. “There’s one quick shot of me looking back, and maybe you see in my eyes a little bit of regret and a little bit of, like, ‘Why did I do that?’ And I think that’s what makes Jon such an amazing storyteller and collaborator, is that he allows for that to be there.”
In “Wicked: For Good,” a flashback to her childhood shows young Glinda’s desire for magic, as she tries to impress her friends at her birthday party. It’s her origin story, and it shows her craving the approval of others. Flash forward to present-day Oz. Glinda lives in her bliss, as pain and suffering happen around her. She’s loved, and she’s finally going to marry Fiyero. But Elphaba discovers and releases the animals that the Wizard has been keeping in cages in his castle — she releases them and they stampede through the wedding venue, ruining the ceremony. When Fiyero chooses to leave with Elphaba, Glinda’s left heartbroken and angry. She suggests how the Wizard and Madame Morrible can use Elphaba’s sister Nessa Rose (Marissa Bode) to lure the fugitive out of hiding.
Grande says that everything from the moment when Glinda decides to use Elphaba’s sister to the fight scene she has with her former friend “was really hard emotionally.” For Glinda to tell them to use Nessa Rose as bait, “I really needed that to make sense, that she would say that, for her to actually be that broken and get to that level of despair, that she would say something so terrible. I spent a lot of time inventing reasons for her to recount little memories of Elphaba and Fiyero together,” Grande says. “It’s just not something that I think Glinda, in her truest self, would do. I needed her to be a broken, disconnected, possessed version of herself, and I wanted her to go to a dark enough place for her to say that.”
Cinematographer Alice Brooks captured that pivotal decision with a close-up. “She does the most wicked thing in the movie,” Brooks says. “You see her walk forward into this very tight close-up. You have the Wizard and Morrible in the background. We didn’t give [editor] Myron Kerstein an option to cut to them. There’s no footage of them. It’s completely out of focus. In the background, you can hear them talking, but we just stayed with Glinda as you watch her make that decision. It’s the choice that changes everybody’s lives.”
Chu explains this is when you see the wheels turning in Glinda. “The resentment, the betrayal, the reaction to the shame of saying something out loud, and her covering that, saying, ‘No, I’m allowed to say that’ and then her walking away.”
No stone was left unturned when it came to developing Glinda’s arc through makeup and costume. The details were subtle but helped Grande disappear into the role and create the character.
Makeup head Frances Hannon (nominated for a Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild award) and Grande collaborated on Glinda’s look, embedding subtle changes to reflect the passage of time, such as making her hair longer and blonder. “You’re also looking in the mirror and seeing someone who’s visibly older,” Grande says. “It’s tiny little things like the shape of the eyeshadow and the amount that helps to feel the difference.”
Grande notes that undereye concealer was a concern. “I remember when the conversation came up about whether or not [to use it], after a certain point, in the second movie, and concealer just exits the chat.”
Grande goes on to say, “I’ve been through it and have these eye bags … I remember that being a decision Frances and I made together. We wanted it to seem real and truthful.” Costume designer Paul Tazewell (who won the Costume Designers Guild award for both “Wicked” films) also followed Glinda’s arc in his work. “When we’re introduced to her character, we see that she indeed has fully immersed herself in the Wizard’s world. It’s a princess in a tower, and she is wearing clothes that are true to that,” he says. “Her choice of clothing provides this idea of a person that is privileged and has great style.”
Tazewell’s looks are a nod to Audrey Hepburn’s glamorous and elegant clothes. “When she does indeed take hold of her personal power, and she goes into the pink bubble dress that we are very familiar with from the original film [1939’s “The Wizard of Oz”], there’s a continuing transformation for her.”
A huge turning point for Glinda comes as the Tin Man (Ethan Slater) leads an angry mob chanting “kill the witch.” Glinda hears it from her apartment and shuts her doors.
Until this point, Glinda has always been surrounded by people. “I always say that she’s never been more alone. She’s surrounded by lots of voices telling her how good she is and how needed and important she is, and yet she’s never been more vacant. So when she closes the doors and silences the angry mob outside the window, it’s just silent,” she says. “All you can hear is Glinda taking a deep breath and shutting out the noise and making the decision to actually take a look at herself,” Grande adds. That decision, she says, came from both Chu and editor Kerstein, who landed an ACE Eddie nomination. As Glinda walks through her apartment high above Emerald City, she catches her reflection in the mirror, singing “The Girl in the Bubble,” a musical number that heralds her turning point, as she realizes she needs to change.
Universal Pictures
Composer Stephen Schwartz says of the ballad, it’s “the moment where Glinda gets real. She drops all the artifice that she has carried as a character through her entire life, both as the popular girl, and then also as Glinda the Good, who floats around in this bubble and sings to people in soprano.”
Grande says the number took months of planning on the technical side, so everything could align. It also reflects a visual representation of what’s happening inside her.
Looking back, Grande says, “I think that she was a good person and a good kid who got lost along
the way. So many of us are just a product of the environment that we grew up in, and I think she’s one of those, but she’s able to break through and burst the bubble and really make Oz a good place, truly a good place.”
Grande adds, “It’s complicated, because her choices aren’t always seemingly the right ones but they ultimately lead her to being the one that’s able to save Oz and save the animals.”
With both films, Grande says, “I really do love Glinda, even when I disagree with her. I have to love her in order to do the work justice.”
She remembers moments when she and Chu would sit on the floor discussing Glinda and “those things that I wanted them to see in her, the goodness that I wanted to peek through a little bit, even
when she’s at her worst, as the films progress.”
She adds, “I don’t know that anyone else would have given a character like Glinda the time and space to be known in this way. And I think that it’s important, because I do think she’s quietly a bit of a hero. She’s more than meets the eye.”
