Cynthia Erivo isn’t here for you mocking the ‘Wicked’ poster
Fans of the musical Wicked are about to embark on a wonderful new adventure to Shiz University. Or, well, a new take on the story we love so much. Jon M. Chu is bringing us his version of the musical in movie form but some fans are being annoying.
The poster for the original Broadway production of Wicked is iconic. It features a drawing of Elphaba wearing her black hat and smirking but you can only see a portion of her green face. You cannot see her eyes. In white is Glinda the Good Witch, holding her hand up to Elphie’s ear to tell her a secret. When fans saw the poster for the movie, which is a real life take on the poster, they were not happy that you could see star Cynthia Erivo’s eyes. It is weird how angry they got.
It got to the point where someone photoshopped the image to hide Erivo’s features and force her to smirk and left Ariana Grande relatively untouched. The reaction forced Erivo to address the situation. She took to her Instagram stories to talk about how she found the edit offensive. “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful Ai of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your ***** green.’ None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us. The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION.”
She went on, saying: “I am a real life human being, who chose to to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer …because, without words we communicate with our eyes. Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”
Erivo posted the poster again to make a point
The joke posters were enough for Erivo and when she posted her pushback about them, she took the time to post the original film poster as well. On it, she wrote “Let me put this right here, to remind you and cleanse your palette.”
The reality of the situation is this: Musical fans were being too nitpicky and Erivo wasn’t having them erasing her face and eyes from the poster. It would be one thing if someone did the poster to look like the Broadway one and that was that. Instead, people online were relentless in their bashing of the poster.
Frankly, it was weird to see a bunch of people essentially telling Elphie to smile.
It does have many online though pointing out that Erivo’s story is going to bring up some questions for her followers who are not spending their every waking hour on social media.
Erivo also commented on Charli XCX’s post using the Wicked poster that turned the Brat singer into Elphie’s green self to promote her song “Sympathy is a knife” featuring Ariana Grande.
To put it simply: Don’t change the Wicked movie poster. It is cool and it is its own thing and that is something we should be celebrating!
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