Cynthia Erivo recently shared why she stopped her Oscar campaign for Wicked: For Good.
In an interview with Variety, Erivo said she was deeply affected by the attack herecostar Ariana Grande experienced in Singapore during their press tour.
“Nobody moved. Nobody moved,” Erivo recalled. “So I moved because my brain went, ‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’ My immediate reaction was ‘Get him away from us.’ And what people couldn’t see is that he wouldn’t let go [of Grande]. He wouldn’t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off.”
Following the incident, Erivo said she was subject to “insidious” memes and TikTok targeting her physique and “the fact that I was bald. It was about what I looked like.” Also, the “assumption that I was bigger than my co-star. So I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role.”
“I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized,” Erivo said. “I felt like something I 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.”
“I didn’t want to put myself through it,” she said. “
“And I didn’t feel like I deserved it. It didn’t help,” Erivo continued. “It felt like there was already 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.”
ERIVO ON WORKING WITH GRANDE
Erivo said that Wicked “took over everything,” and that it “beautifully changed my life.”
“We were holding on by threads,” Erivo said about working with Grande. “And we were really trying to take care of each other.”