Cynthia Erivo says the end of the Wicked journey left her and Ariana Grande exhausted, shaken and still unusually close. In a May 27 interview, the 39-year-old actor said the two women were “holding on by threads” by the time their work on the two-part musical finished, adding that they were “really trying to take care of each other” and still text almost every day.
That bond was forged over two years of promotion after they were cast in November 2021 as Elphaba and Glinda in the studio’s adaptation of the stage musical. Erivo said the pair spent those years on lengthy global press campaigns for both films, a run that included the Singapore premiere of the second movie, Wicked: For Good, where a fan jumped the barricade and grabbed Grande.
Erivo said the moment was terrifying. “In that moment, we were all terrified,” she said, describing how the incident landed during a campaign already marked by pressure and scrutiny. She also said there had been “a sort of upturned nose at the second installment, even though we all knew there was a second film coming and we were just doing our jobs.”
The pair’s public life around Wicked has carried unusual weight because the first film earned 10 Oscar nominations, including acting nominations for both Erivo and Grande. The second, Wicked: For Good, hit theaters in November 2025 but received no Oscar nominations. For Erivo, the difference was not just about awards; she said the Singapore incident and the reaction around it may have changed how willing she was to keep campaigning, including for an Oscar.
She said the fallout pushed her into a deeper frustration about how Black women are viewed. “I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized,” she said, adding that something she did instinctively “had been made to be something that it simply was not because of the way people see women who look like me, and because of the assumptions that are made, and I just didn't want to be a part of that, really and truly.” She said, “I didn't want to put myself through it,” and added, “I didn't feel like I deserved it.”
The tension in Erivo’s comments is that the promotional machine around Wicked was meant to celebrate a blockbuster pair, yet it also exposed the actors to a level of attention that turned dangerous and, she says, distorted. Erivo said there was an assumption “that I was bigger than my co-star and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role,” adding, “I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around.”
For now, the clearest answer in Erivo’s remarks is that the friendship survived the grind, even if the campaign did not come away unscarred. “Maybe in a way it did, actually,” she said of whether the Singapore incident affected her willingness to keep pushing through the awards season. The two are still texting almost every day, but their latest chapter suggests the most successful part of the Wicked run may have been the one no publicity tour could manufacture: two performers learning, under pressure, how to protect each other and themselves.
