Everyone is bubbling with excitement as we get closer to the release of the first Wicked movie — a.k.a. the day we can finally see Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo step into the shoes of Glinda and Elphaba. But, as it turns out, the two almost didn’t get cast had they gone for director Jon M. Chu’s original direction for the project.
Director Jon M. Chu recently sat down with SFX Magazine to talk about all things Wicked and revealed the movies almost had very different leading ladies, as production was first focused on casting "no-namers” for the titular roles.
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Speaking to the publication, Chu explained that since Wicked “is a big enough property on its own,” the production team wanted to start with “a very clear slate” and hence “discover two people” with an open casting. “I was like, 'We're gonna find no-namers'. But then we got calls from all these great actresses who wanted to audition, and we saw everybody, and they were all really great,” Chu said.
He continued saying that “anyone could have done” Wicked, but “there were two people who were meant to do this role, for this particular movie at this particular time.”
Of course, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo still had to audition for the role, and Universal has actually given us a peek at them via a featurette called Wicked - Passion Project. “When she came in, she was an Ari that I’d never seen before,” Chu said about Grande’s audition.
Grande, who chose to be credited with her full name, Ariana Grande-Butera, for the project, had previously echoed the sentiment. "I had to completely erase popstar Ari, the person [the Wicked producers] know so well because it’s harder to believe someone as someone else because they’re so branded as one thing. I had to really go all the way to strip that down,” she revealed in early 2024.
Speaking to the New York Times recently, Grande admitted some members of her team suggested she could skip auditioning, and she refused. “As soon as I got murmurs of the fact that it could possibly be turning into a film, all I wanted was a chance to audition. Some members of my team at the time were like, ‘You shouldn’t even have to audition,’ and I was like, ‘You don’t understand, of course I have to. This is something that has to be earned.’ I have so much to prove, and I threw myself at it in every way that I could,” she shared.
Speaking of Erivo’s audition in the Passion Project featurette, Chu said: “Cynthia is so raw and vulnerable, and I couldn't get her out of my head.” Speaking to WSJ, he added: “I knew she would kill the audition, but the magnitude at which she did … you could feel her voice in your body.”
Speaking to SFX, Chu said the decision to cast the two stars ultimately came down to their skill sets. "What we found out when we were auditioning everyone, was that the songs are so important in this movie, and so emotionally important to this movie, that the person who's doing it has to get into song and out of song so easily that it's like butter, like you don't even notice it. That means having good chops in their skill set,” he said.
