This story contains major spoilers for “Wicked: For Good.”
Jon M. Chu isn’t shy about it — the second half of his two-film adaptation is the one where he tears down walls. Literally.
One of the film’s most talked-about sequences — the split-door staging of “For Good” — wasn’t scripted and almost didn’t exist.
Chu says he found the emotional shape of the moment months before cameras rolled. During an early rehearsal, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande began improvising a goodbye — speaking, not singing — with their arms wrapped around each other in a corner of the room. When they placed their hands against an imaginary door, Chu says he “started to weep.”
“It was in rehearsals that we found it,” Chu reveals. “Cynthia grabs her and says, ‘Come here.’ And I’m like, where are they going? And they go to this corner, and she puts her in a box or a closet.”
That rehearsal changed everything. The director admitted he forgot to call cut as the two stars continued riffing on their characters’ farewell. The moment’s authenticity convinced Chu to demolish a wall to capture it on film.
By the time production reached the number, Chu insisted the physical set had to match the emotional truth. “We had to knock down that wall,” he says. “They told me, ‘If you knock down that wall, you can’t use the set anymore.’ But I didn’t care. It was the moment. Knock down the effing wall.”
The resulting split-frame sequence, with Erivo and Grande pressed against opposite sides of a now-destroyed barrier, quickly became the emotional centerpiece of the film — and, Chu says, his personal favorite moment across both installments.
It also led directly to the title. “That’s when I knew the second movie had to be called ‘For Good.’”
The scene also required bending one of the film’s established linguistic guidelines. According to Chu, Oz has language rules — ones that Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the original stage score, had long held as canon.
Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in “Wicked for Good.”
Universal Pictures
“You’re not allowed to say ‘I love you’ in Oz,” Chu says. “No God, no okay, no I love you.”
But when Erivo told Grande, “I love you” on set, Chu fought to keep the line. “It was so human,” he says. “It crossed over a boundary of Oz into our world.” Schwartz eventually agreed.
If “Wicked” is the lighter, comedic rise, “Wicked: For Good,” Chu says, is a descent — a darker, more political tragedy.
Chu details the transformation of Boq into the Tin Man, played exquisitely by Ethan Slater, which he describes as “the birth of a monster” that goes beyond the physical metamorphosis. “Boq is someone who’s ignored. Someone who wants acknowledgement that he exists,” Chu says.
“When he’s making his speech in front of that crowd on the steps of the capital of Oz, and there’s fire, and he’s telling his grievances. He changes in that moment even more than he changed when he turned into the tin man,” Chu explains.
In “Wicked: For Good,” Boq stands on the steps of the Capitol, flames behind him, railing against everything he’s lost. Slater suggested one of the transformation’s defining beats: Boq looking at Glinda, realizing he no longer needs her, then turning back to the roaring crowd that validates his growing rage.
“That is the full transformation,” Chu asserts. “That’s when he really loses his heart. Not when his body turns to tin — but when he finds community in hate.”
Longtime fans of the stage musical have spent two decades debating whether Glinda knows Elphaba is alive at the end of the story. Chu says the film has an answer, but he doesn’t want to confirm it.
“I definitely have a definitive idea in my head,” he says. “But I prefer everyone to be able to interpret it how they want to.”
Chu emphasizes that the power of the ending lies in both women stepping into the unknown — Glinda choosing to try to be Glinda the Good, and Elphaba stepping into a new life beyond the shadows of Oz.
“It was never a buttoned-up fairy tale,” he says. “It was born of raw human nature, and something beautiful emerges from that.”
Chu is aware that the political imagery — misinformation, fracturing communities, a populace choosing “truths” based on collective belief rather than fact — is resonating more sharply today.
But he insists it wasn’t intentional commentary.
“The line ‘the truth is not a thing of fact or reason, it’s just what we all agree on’ was written 20 years ago,” he says. “That’s the power of a timeless story. It always feels timely.”
Still, he acknowledges that the world seems to keep catching up to the movie’s themes. “Every week it gets more relevant.”
“Wicked: For Good” is now playing in theaters.
