From Singing Live, Voice Retraining, and Getting Matching Tattoos, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo Share their Journey Together as Glinda and Elphaba in ‘Wicked’

Wicked has always been a journey of self-discovery, and rising up against adversity, but in the heart of it all is the friendship between two young women, Glinda and Elphaba. The right actresses were critical for the film, but director Jon M. Chu and his fellow filmmakers knew instantly that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were the perfect choices.

From the start, their bond was unmistakable. The pair had dinner at Chu’s house, with producer Marc Platt and composer Stephen Schwartz.  “Stephen went to the piano and said to Cynthia and Ari, ‘Shall we sing, ‘For Good’?” Chu says. “Cynthia and Ari didn’t rehearse it. They’d never done it together. They sang it, and my four-year-old daughter’s jaw dropped to the floor. No one has ever seen two powerhouses like this before. It’s been beautiful to see how well connected they are.”For Ariana Grande, her connection with Glinda was deep, and she was able to draw from her experiences to embody the role. “Spending this time with Glinda has been a profound journey of self-discovery and healing for me,” Grande says. “It’s remarkable how embodying her character and embracing self-trust has brought about such personal growth and inner healing. Through this experience, I’ve learned to trust myself more and have found a newfound sense of understanding and empowerment. It’s a beautiful thing—I think we all healed through these characters and through each other. This story is so important, especially now, when everything is boiled down to headlines or cherry-picked quotes. It fights for truth, humanness and the complexities of being misunderstood. It shows that a person can be good and wicked. We all have these women within us; we can all recognize pieces of ourselves in them.”

Grande put in the work to train for a role that she’s possibly been preparing for a decade.  “I had been chasing producer Marc Platt down for about ten years, wondering when this movie was going to happen and when I would have the opportunity to audition,” Grande says. “When I finally found out about the audition, I started training every day with my vocal coach Eric Vetro and my acting coach Nancy Banks. I had to retrain my voice to sing more classically and operatically, which is my range but a style I hadn’t done since I was much younger. It takes the chords a while to reacclimate, like any other muscle, which requires a lot of training.”Meanwhile, director Chu has found the perfect Elphaba, a character who has been an outcast, whose pain has hardened her but has not touched her compassionate heart, in Oscar nominee and Grammy, Emmy and Tony winner, Cynthia Erivo. “To have Cynthia Erivo, a woman of color, play a woman who is green makes all the world of difference,” Chu says. “When she sang ‘Defying Gravity,’ she blew the roof off. We were stunned. As soon as Cynthia left the room, we said, ‘our search is finally done.’”

Cynthia Erivo also put in months of training for her role, so that she can harness the power needed for belting out Elphaba’s lyrics. She often found joy in the work, saying, “I hope that this joy keeps growing. I hope we find something to spark joy in every day. This was a long process, and I knew that it would get hard sometimes. But I knew, even on those days, that we would find something that makes us love and reconnect to what brought us here.”

At the end of the journey, Grande and Erivo honored each other and their roles by immortalizing it with tattoos. “We got tattoos together,” Grande says. “I got an ‘E’ for Elphaba in a heart on the back of my leg and she had a little ‘G’ for Glinda on the back of hers.” Erivo says that their bond is anchored by a sense of joyful exploration. “I hope that we don’t lose our love of play,” Erivo says. “That’s something that I really enjoyed—this need to keep wanting to learn and discover. Ariana and I used that to make these beings as humane and full as possible. When we worked together, something special happened.”

Tickets out now! Head to your local cinema, or check out their ticketing sites to reserve your seats for Wicked, in Philippine cinemas on November 20.

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Check out the “Singing Live” featurette here: