Inside Cynthia Erivo’s ‘Wicked’ Experience, Letting Go Of “Fierce” Elphaba And The New ‘Dracula’ Production That “Terrified” Her

There’s an uncommon commotion emanating from the front row of the refurbished Town Hall across from Kings Cross railway station where Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo has been discussing her book Simply More with Doctor Who and Barbie actor Ncuti Gatwa.

Some in in the audience crane forward as others, closer to whatever’s going on, leap from their seats fearing that the beloved Wicked Witch of the West might be in some danger. Was someone attempting to attack her?

Erivo didn’t shy away. She rose from her chair and moved downstage and leant over the apron. The ear-splitting wails came from a little girl trying to get the star’s attention. “She just shot up, waving her hands … It didn’t feel like she was moving off her own accord,” Erivo tells us the following day as we sit in a private loft at London’s swanky Langan Hotel.

Soothing words were offered to the girl and all was calm. “She gave me a little doll that she had customized. It was a little me. Not as Elphaba, but as me. It was just a really sweet, very human moment,” she allows.

Does that happen a lot? “Human moments with people? Yes.”

Erivo adds: ”There’s a comfortability that people have now and they just want to share what they’re feeling, what they’re going through, what they’ve experienced, what the work means to them, how it’s changed things for them.”

You’re a force for good on and off screen, I tell her. Her face brightens. “I’d like to be,” she responds softly.

People seated around me at the event seemed almost evangelical about Erivo, after it was over, several hundred of them scrambled to collect pre-ordered copies of Simply More. They then raced to the stage door to await Erivo’s departure, where, of course, pandemonium ensued when she greeted them.

Wicked director Jon M. Chu says that when we first see Elphaba in Wicked: For Goodhe wanted to ensure that she was seen as “all powerful,” not wanting her to have to fit into what a guy’s perception of what a superhero is.

How were she and Chu able to manifest that, I wondered?

Shooting both films at the same time, Erivo wanted to know what Elphaba’s power actually was. “In the stage show [still running on Broadway and London] the power is literally kind of not really even discussed. And it’s like the broom flies… And I was like, It has to be more than that… So I want to get specific about what power is. And then he and I had a conversation that her power is dominion over gravity. So she can take or give, she can remove the force of gravity from things or she can give the force of gravity. So she makes things land. And then beyond that, she has visions which we see, which we explore in the second movie as well. And because we keep talking about this unlimited power, what we see her do is grow it.

“If she has dominion over gravity, she doesn’t actually need anything to fly, but that broom allows her to move faster. It’s like a motorbike for someone who could already drive…”

With all that power, how could it be finessed? The last time we saw her in Wicked One she’s defying gravity realizing that she can actually fly and now it should be second nature that she can move and she can maneuver. “And there’s a little fun in it for her, almost,” she asserts.

Chu likes to call Elphaba a “badass.”  Erivo nods knowingly. “She’s fierce now, she’s in her own power. She has a particular kind of strength over it. She’s a superhero.”

Her hair has grown, it’s wilder. Erivo says that her habit was to flick her hair to the side, we see her do that in the first movie when she steps off the launch upon her arrival at Shizz.

That was just an accidental thing, but Chu liked what he saw and he shot her moving her hair to one side and the gesture’s repeated in Wicked: For Good.

“Now it’s free and it’s loose and it’s wild, it’s out. And I don’t know if I was necessarily channeling any one person, but I actually think I just sort of found her language and vocabulary because I knew that my hands were something that we both knew was sort of like a character,” she says flashing her talon-like nails, all dressed up. “They are a character,” she laughs.

Part of the storytelling is how Elphaba moves her hands as she makes spells. The hair and the nails are what she calls “detailed nuances” of who the Wicked Witch of the West is.

There are hints of Shakespearean heroines banished by society because they can’t handle or control her. What’s underpinning this story is a woman against … As I search for the right word, Erivo instantly offers, “Fascism.”

On the day that I saw Wicked: For Good for the first time I noted the scenes of Oz’s animal creatures being rounded up and herded towards a land beneath the earth’s crust and Elphaba is trying to ease their plight by swooping down on Emerald City’s Praetrorian Guard.

That image became sort of juxtaposed in my head with footage seen of ICE officers in balaclavas rounding up people in Chicago. “It just hits right at the time it’s needed and we didn’t know it was going to do that,” says Erivo of the film’s potency. “But we did know that we didn’t want it just to be candy. And I knew I didn’t want this character to be candy. I knew I didn’t want her to be two dimensional. I knew I wanted her to have depth. I knew I wanted her to really matter.”

Elphaba reminds one, to an extent, of someone like, say, Nancy Pelosi, who made decisions that mattered.

Where do Elphaba and Cynthia Erivo meet, I wondered.

Considering the question, Erivo remarks: ”I think they meet very firmly in the middle. I think that Elphaba is someone whose decisions matter. And I think the decisions I make matter, to be honest. I think the decision to play her mattered. I think that the choices I make about the characters I choose to play matter because they either will shift perspective or disturb perspective. Hopefully both. Because even though there is movement forward for performers and actors and whatnot, there is still a place where we’re kind of stuck and the shifts haven’t shifted enough just yet. And I’m lucky because of the decisions I’ve made thus far, which have not boxed me in, which have forced people to go: ‘Well. I guess we have to find something interesting, present something that’s different to her.’ And that gives me a chance to go, ‘Actually, yeah, I will play the Samurai [in Karoshi] I will actually play the Wicked Wicked of the West. Oh yeah. I’ll do this film where she’s a lawyer [Prima Facie]. I can do that!’’’

Sorry, you play a Samurai?!

“She is a Samurai who is a CEO in a big entrepreneurial firm… And essentially would be a villain in this piece, like an actual villain. But she’s like gray area because she thinks everything she’s doing is justified. And in a way it is, but it’s far more sinister. But I love it because she looks essentially exactly like me. There is no wig,” Erivo explains.

“She fights. Speaks Japanese, the whole lot,” she says as she pulls up a pair of custom made super funky Louis Vuitton boots that encase the slender length of her legs. “There are swords…It’s full on.”

Karoshi was shot in Vancouver.

First Faceadapted from Suzie Miller’s West End and Broadway hit that garnered Jodie Comer Tony and Olivier Award honors is about Tessa, an attorney who goes after the man who raped her. It’s almost gladiatorial but the arena in this instance is a courtroom.

For the screen the script “has to become something else. And Suzie was so open to shifting it and changing it where it needed to and opening the aperture a little bit for me,” she notes.

“And you’ll recognize it, but it won’t be someone stepping in the role that Jodie has played. This is Tessa for screen, that’s Tessa for the stage, and we’re two different Tessa’s.”

It was important for her to move on, and to remind people that this graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art has a full panoply of thespian artistry at her elongated fingertips.

“Because I think sometimes we find it hard to let go of a thing we really love. My job as an actor isn’t to repeat myself, my job as an actor is someone who wants to tell stories is to tell different stories. So once this story has been told, this story has been told, and I love her [ Elphaba] so much and she has changed my life. But there are other women to meet. There are other characters to meet… There are other stories to tell… And I want to challenge myself. I also want to grow as a performer. I want to grow as someone who loves this craft. I want to give myself hard jobs to do so that I can be better. I constantly want to be exploring who I am as a performer.”

Sipping her carefully blended tea she says that she “refuses” to be boxed in “because doing the same thing twice,” she states, [while reminding me that Wicked One and Wicked: For Good is one story in two films]“doesn’t make sense to me.”

When Chu and I first started talking about his Wicked films, he described the South Londoner as “our Barbra Streisand.” Now he corrects himself and hails her as “Our Cynthia Erivo,” appropriately so because the landscape is unlimited for her.

Just before Thanksgiving, Erivo travelled back to Los Angeles, to start rehearsals to play Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Australian director Kip Williams. He’s the guy who staged The Picture of Dorian Gray with Succession star Sarah Snook playing multiple parts.

In DraculaErivo will take on a similar task performing all 23 roles in the story.

Rehearsals will then shift over in late December to London in preparation for a first performance at the Noel Coward Theatre on February 4.

What made her return to the London stage for the first time in over a decade?

Simple. “Because it scared the sh*t out of me, that’s why,” she insists. “I was terrified of it.”

She viewed archived footage of Dracula’s Australian production. “And I knew we were going to shift and change it. I knew it was going to become deeper. I knew all of those things and my manager sent it to me. She said, ‘Listen, hey, I think you should look at this. I think it might be something that you want to do.’ I looked at it and I said, ‘Jess [manager Jessica Morgulis]it scares me sh*tless. It frightens the hell out of me. I think I’m going to do it.’ And we left it alone for a couple of months, and then I saw A Picture of Dorian Gray in New York. I sat and chatted with Kip and just a part of me was hoping that something would convince me not to do it. And I left thinking, ‘Gosh, I have to do this. Fine. I have to do this.’ So that’s why I’m doing it.”

Her name is above the title in big, black, bold letters CYNTHIA ERIVO. Ten years ago she couldn’t get arrested in London. The Royal National Theatre wouldn’t give her the time of day. Even after her success on Broadway in The Color Purplethe NT demanded she audition for the tiny role of the Blue Fairy in a production of Pinocchio. No thank you, was her answer.

The show was an artistic flop.

How does it feel to be returning to the West End with her name in lights?

Close to tears, she says that it’s “crazy, really wonderful.” It feels like “a full circle. I’ve not been on the stage in the U.K. since The Color Purple.”

Recently, the NT has put out discreet feelers to see if they might persuade her to perform on one of its stages. She remarks approvingly that Indhu Rubasingham is now artistic director of the National and Erivo does not rule out the possibility of appearing there one day. And there are other theatrical passions that she might pursue in the near future.