How Cynthia Erivo Survived ‘Wicked’ — and Thrived: ‘People Thought I Was Being Myself, Even Though I Was Green’

When Cynthia Erivo describes life inside the “Wicked” machine — the double-feature adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical — it’s hard not to picture a woman swept up by a cyclone. “We were holding on by threads,” Erivo says of the past four years, “and we were really trying to take care of each other.”

“We,” of course, refers to Erivo and her co-star, Ariana Grande, the Glinda to Erivo’s Elphaba. As she and I meet on a balmy April morning at the Hotel Café Royal in London, Erivo is six months past the release of “Wicked: For Good,” the sequel that would turn the two-movie franchise into a $1.2 billion juggernaut. Currently, Erivo is appearing on stage in “Dracula,” her one-woman show at the Noël Coward Theatre in London. But Erivo — a queer Black woman who made one of movie history’s iconic characters into her own —  is clearly still processing what turned out to be an extraordinarily challenging experience.

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