ariana grande and cynthia erivo

how the casting happened

erivo was cast first. she arrived at the film with a tony, a grammy and an emmy for the 2015 broadway revival of the color purple, and elphaba is the part every casting conversation about her had been circling for years. grande's route was less obvious: she self-taped, at a point when the industry's read on her was pop star who acts occasionally rather than musical-theatre performer who happens to be a pop star. the second description is the accurate one — she was on broadway at fourteen, before the television, before any of the records.

the fuller version of that argument is on her screen page, which lists thirty credits rather than the four a music site usually bothers with.

why the friendship reads as real

two leads promoting a film say they love each other, and the correct default response to that is scepticism. the reason this one is generally taken at face value comes down to circumstances rather than to anything either of them said.

they shot two films back to back over about a year and a half — an unusually long time to be the only two people in a scene together — and they did it playing characters whose entire arc is a friendship that survives an irreconcilable political disagreement. both of them also sing live on camera, which is technically brutal and requires trusting your scene partner in a way ordinary dialogue does not. and both were carrying the same specific pressure: elphaba and glinda are among the most jealously guarded roles in musical theatre, and the audience arrived ready to be disappointed.

wicked is a story about two women who are supposed to be enemies and turn out to be the most important person in each other's life. casting it well and then filming it for eighteen months is a fairly efficient way to produce the real thing.

the press tour that became a genre

the 2024 promotional run generated more internet than the film's trailer did. the emotional register was extremely high, the two of them were physically inseparable in every interview, and one exchange in particular — an interviewer telling erivo that people were "holding space" with the lyrics of defying gravity, and grande reaching for her hand as she answered — was turned into several million jokes inside a week.

the more interesting reading is that the mockery and the affection came from the same place. a press tour is normally an exercise in saying nothing for six weeks. this one was two people who were visibly not managing their emotions well in public, which the internet finds funny and, on a slightly longer delay, moving.

what came of it

• wicked (november 2024) — the first half. ten academy award nominations, including best picture.
• the nominations (march 2025) — erivo for best actress, grande for best supporting actress. a pop musician being nominated for a musical is the kind of thing that gets called a stunt until you watch it; this was not one.
• wicked: for good (november 2025) — the second half, where glinda stops being funny. filmed alongside the first, released a year later.

for grande the sequence is the hinge of the second act of a career: it reintroduced her to an enormous audience with no relationship to her music at all, and the run of it — four years of work, two films, one nomination — is laid out against everything else on the timeline.