I’ll get you, my pretty…
When people see her, they will scream…
Cynthia Erivo knew there was no way she could play Elphaba, the girl who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, without turning to one of the most iconic portrayals for inspiration.
“Margaret Hamilton was definitely a touchstone for me,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. Hamilton played the Wicked Witch in the legendary 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s novel. Her interpretation of the witch dictated how the character would be viewed for decades to come.
Get a glimpse of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s tearful Wicked auditions
Prior to Hamilton, the witch, as described in Baum’s book, had a more haggish appearance, but Hamilton was the first to go green for the role — a now iconic part of the witch’s identity and a core part of why Elphaba is an outsider in the Wicked musical. She also gave the witch her signature cackle, black dress, and pointed hat.
But it was one smaller distinctive feature that particularly made Erivo melt. “You don’t compute those things when you’re younger,” she explains of the details she picked up revisiting Hamilton’s performance as an adult. “I didn’t realize until I went back. But I always go back to this image of the black and white [silhouette] where she’s got her claws. It’s the first time I realized, ‘Oh, she has nails. That’s something I can pull in to the look of her.'”
Wicked first reactions call film a ‘musical masterpiece,’ praise Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande
Erivo often has incredible manicures, and she’s leaned into showing them off on the red carpets and Wicked press tour. But it’s also something she specifically took from Hamilton and brought to her version of Elphaba (she’s also mentioned the nails before as a key part of emphasizing her identity as a Black woman and how that infuses the character).
“I was like, ‘Where does that come from?'” Erivo said on the Sentimental Men podcast of determining the origins and style of Elphaba’s nails. “‘What do we do to make it feel like it’s part of the DNA of her?’ Her DNA does something to the way things grow. We went through a set of different ideas of what the nails could look like, then we settled on — it’s just an extension of the green.” Erivo also teased that viewers should keep their eyes peeled for how the shade of her nails shifts as Elphaba changes too.
Of course, she also took inspiration from the original Wicked witches — Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, who joined Erivo and costar Ariana Grande (Glinda) for an exclusive conservation with EW.
“I had seen the show a couple times,” Ervio adds. “I had listened to both of you [Menzel and Chenoweth] often, so I had your voices in my head, and I had Margaret Hamilton’s imagery. It’s really nice to find pieces of those things to create something and then add my own thing to it.”
Wicked star Cynthia Erivo says she wouldn’t use the bathroom once she had put on her costume (exclusive)
Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.
Wicked premiered on Broadway in 2003. Based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel of the same name and with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, the Wizard of Oz prequel musical traces the two witches’ paths from students at Shiz University to Elphaba becoming the Wicked Witch of the West. The show went on to earn 10 Tony Award nominations in 2004, including one for Best Musical.
The film adaptation is being split into two parts with the first half scheduled to hit theaters on Nov. 22. Directed by Jon M. Chu, the adaptation also features Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Bowen Yang, and Marissa Bode.
Watch the video above for more and look to the western skies (and by that, we mean EW) for more from our exclusive conversation with the four witches.
Maureen Lee Lenker
