‘Wicked’ Director Jon M. Chu On Adapting Musical, Casting Cynthia Erivo

EXCLUSIVE: Jon M. Chu learned to use his power in the right way — just as Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba does in Wicked.

Chu says that after 15 years working with studios he knew “how the machine works” because otherwise, he says, it’s very easy to get “overwhelmed by the pressures of fans, by the pressure of the studio, by spending money, by pressures of people who originated the parts …so I already have a sort of resilience to that.”

He says that he knew with Wicked that he “had to follow my instincts, and I knew how to manipulate the studio to get the right money, to get the right resources.”

After all, he asserts, “I’m protecting them in my mind. You have gold in your hands. This is an IP that’s never been out onto the screen…”

Chu claps his hands and reveals the pitch he made to top executives at Universal.

“This is Oz. This is cinema legacy. We have to do this right for you. I’m doing this for you. Yes, we’re spending all that money. … It’s a huge undertaking, thousands of hands. Thousands of human hands, not computer hands. Computer helps in VFX and all things, but this film is not generated by VFX.

“And yes, you’re right, it’s hard to control that. But what I also learned in some of my other movies before is that everyone’s going to offer you 120 percent. And it’s so easy to be enamored by 120 percent. Yes, more music, yes more effects, yes, more this and that.

“But that’s not where the story lies.The story lies in the restraints and choosing your moments and saying no to a lot, and being crystal clear of the intention that when you are inundated with costumes and hair and things, that all you have to do is keep track of your intention and you don’t have to be distracted by all that stuff,” he sighs after his mini-dissertation.

The beauty of Wicked, for me, is that, yes, it’s huge in that Golden Age MGM musical kinda way, but it’s also so intimate: two young women — Elphaba and Glinda, played by Erivo and Ariana Grande, respectively — the absolute antithesis of each other. One is shy, good, and bright but because of the pigmentation of her green skin she’s considered other, an outsider, while the girl with the wavy blonde tresses that match her complexion is frivolous, selfish, yet to discover her inner glow. 

They meet on their first day at school, and dramatic lore tells us that their animosity towards each other will turn to friendship, but will it be for good?

It was Chu’s, and producer Marc Platt’s, decision to cast Erivo in the central role of Elphaba that gives the film its subversive edge. “I think casting Cynthia just is probably the smartest thing I ever did in my life,” Chu says. “She looked at this as a very personal story and she brought those things of what it feels to be othered, what it feels like to have people constantly tell you, you need to act this way or that way for people to accept you, that you have to prove yourself to someone.

“But she’s also the same person who at drama school dreamed, dreamed big, that she would be able to get there. And those dreams were also crushed, whether it’s at drama school or elsewhere.”

He pleads: “Where are the parts?”

Erivo powers the tale with her extraordinary performance. Her Black skin adds another dimension.

I reacted differently to Wicked than when I saw it in preview on Broadway two decades ago, when Idina Menzel originated Elphaba and Kristin Chenoweth created Glinda.

I was knocked out by them but, in truth, I wasn’t fully as one with Winnie Holzman’s book adapted from Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I wasn’t able to scratch beneath the surface. I was just out to enjoy a great big Broadway show with two show-stopping stars.

Also, I couldn’t hear the lyrics. I could make out every third word. Now, because of Simon Hayes’ superb sound design for the movie, it’s like I’ve heard Wicked for the first time and it has been a revelation to me, as I know it has been to friends and relatives, of all hues, the world over, mainly because of Erivo.

“Musicals can be very subversive,” Chu says.

They can tell you about the world if you’re willing to listen.

Chu says that when he and Erivo would talk about her casting, “We’d be like, ‘This is a coup!’ They don’t even know. They know what we’cre doing inside this movie right now. And it felt we were co-conspirators, with Ari of course, to try to…”

Signing Erivo was both a coup and subversive. “How lucky are we?” he agrees.

Chu’s Wicked uncovers something stark and dark about America, throw in apartheid South Africa too, and there are other instances as well, and turns a mirror on ourselves with a palette that’s palatable. Stephen Schwartz’s songs sure do soar in this film, and golly, a 100-piece orchestra is beyond joyous. That’s what big Hollywood movies at their best can achieve when cash money is put in service of the material.

Musicals are, primarily, an American art form.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! was groundbreaking when it opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway in 1943 with Alfred Drake declaring “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” but it took director Daniel Fish to reveal what lurked beneath the “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” in his revolutionary reexamination of the classic show that played on and off Broadway a few years back, although I’d argue Chu’s Wicked is more accessible.

By the way, I look forward to the day when Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton is properly dramatized for the big screen. No offense to the version shown on Disney+, but that was just a recording of the stage show. I wanna see it as a movie.

As with all shows and movies, you see what you believe. 

Chu says that Schwartz and Holzman have had 20 years to refine their songs. He believes that the “context of today is very different to a point where we know instinctually that words, just dialogue, isn’t actually enough to express this feeling that we’re at right now, this unknown feeling of where we’re headed.

“And sometimes,” he continues, “a melody, sometimes a myth, sometimes a fantasy, can help uncover what we’re trying to feel, and express it and have it come out loud without being so real that you can’t take it in.”

He adds that the head flips and spins aren’t just for fun; it’s all in the service, he says, of expressing action, expressing movement.

In Wicked’s “The Wizard and I” number, for instance, Elphaba is in constant motion that propels her upwards. She’s ecstatic that she might get to meet the ‘wonderful’ wizard. She keeps rising, step by step, throughout the song until she’s out onto a field.

The set for that number was built specifically after Chu, Erivo and choreographer Christopher Scott read the lyrics out loud.

Elphaba wants to show her freedom and, Chu notes, ”she wanted to show a little bit of her magic where she just sort of lifts up in the air and gets to the edge to see the rainbow … but she’s not ready yet … but that’s where you physicalize that expression. And then we hold it back from the audience. We don’t give it to them until ‘Defying Gravity’.”

Chu is kinda wicked to the core. Years before Platt dangled the opportunity to direct the film in front of him, the theater kid inside the filmmaker had listened to every line of every song. He knew them by heart, as evidenced when I’d quote an obscure song lyric, he’d finish it.

During lockdown, Chu conducted several Zoom sessions, joined by Schwartz, Holzman, Platt and screenwriter Dana Fox, where they went through line by line “every script of Wicked that has ever been written, both stage show and movies” and discussed each line, and the reason why this or that line, or song, got cut.

RELATED: ‘Wicked’: Read The Screenplay For The Highest-Grossing Broadway Musical Movie In History

“It was really just for me to absorb their intention,” Chu explains. “Their true intention of the original text and lyric, because I knew that some of their intention may not have made it all the way to the stage because stage is limited to a certain degree. It’s a medium that has certain rules, and cinema has certain rules, but at the same time some of those tools that we have could express those intentions more clearly.”

Those conversations brought about several additions to the script, and to some songs.

The “For Good” number in the sequel Wicked: For Good, for example, has been boosted by Schwartz for the film and I hear it’s a huge showstopper. Tears were shed by crew when Erivo and Grande performed it live on set.

There was something involving Dulcibear, Elphaba and her sister Nessarose’s nanny, Chu explains. ”She says something that’s atrocious,” but words were changed to something softer so you didn’t hate Dulcibear.

In the “Defying Gravity” number, the guards had been crying out, “Get her!” Chu reveals. “It’s one of the last words the guards are singing. We changed it to ‘Kill her!’ And that was a scary change because it’s at the end of the movie. But it raised the stakes of what the end-game was, which was that they want to kill her.”

Chu learned a lot too, about Nessarose, played by Marissa Bode. She is wheelbound, unable to walk. “What I learned was some ableist thinking that her only dream is to walk. And what I learned is that not everyone who is a wheelchair user wants to walk. That’s not their ultimate dream.”

It was important to make it clear that Elphaba is on her sister’s side in that viewpoint. “Elphaba understands that Nessarose doesn’t need help, but everyone always tries to help her. But she’s very capable. And so it’s like inches in there to go a long way actually,” Chu explains.

He followed a similar interrogation of the verse with Erivo and Grande. They would say the lyrics of every song out loud to fully comprehend its subtext. Then, ahead of rehearsals, the pair recorded the pre-records “just to get get it out of their system to say, ‘Oh you’re singing to find gravity.’ Just sing it. So work with Stephen. Let it out.”

“And so they did that exercise, worked their muscles,” and once they began rehearsing with Chu, “we threw all that away and started from scratch.”

When Erivo first came in to meet with Chu and Platt she performed “The Wizard and I,” and Chu had that “did that really just happen?” moment  when she got to that very line in the song.

As she continued to perform, her interpretation “changed the whole song for me … that’s when we knew,” they had to cast her.

Watching Erivo that day also reminded Chu of being in his dorm room “wishing to be dreaming to be a filmmaker,” or in his dad’s restaurant, Chef Chu’s in Los Altos, CA, doing his homework and imagining the day he doesn’t have to do homework anymore.

Grande had a tougher time of it during auditions because Chu demanded that she prove she could “overcome the Ariana Grande image in order to do it. And I know how hard it is. I’ve seen actors who do their first lead in a movie, and that’s not easy. That also takes skills and that takes actual craftsmanship. That experience can happen,” he asserts.

“And every time she came in, Ari was the most interesting person. She was funny, she was emotional. But more than that she understood the nuance of this character in a way that felt so real it wasn’t a performative version of it,” he tells me.

He called Grande back again and again. “And by the end it was like, if the audience feels like this is a discovery, they’re going to see things they’ve never seen in Ariana Grande before. And even Cynthia, if the world knows her, but not everybody knows her.”

His sense was: “When they see these two, it’s going to feel like a discovery. And that was exciting.”

He’d work with them again too, in a jiffy, if he had the right material.

This didn’t come to mind until after our conversation, but with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber writing new material, at Chu’s behest, for a possible new film version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, then why not consider having Erivo and Grande, perhaps, sharing the role of the show’s narrator?

However, what Chu did say about Joseph was that there are some necessary moments that need to be built on. “It’s built as almost an album, so you don’t have a lot of room for dialogue to interrupt the songs, and so there are opportunities to do so,” he says.

Fox is working on the new book for Joseph, so let’s wait until, as the Rice and Lloyd Webber song goes, it’s all “Go, go, go” for that picture.

Chu played Oliver in a school production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! He’s humming “Where is Love” as he chat. Maybe he’s the one to finally get Cameron Mackintosh’s long-planned cinematic reworking of Oliver! off the ground?

The man’s super busy, so it’ll take awhile.

There’s The Woman in Me, a movie based on Britney Spears’ memoir, and that’s on a fast track.

Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are already at work on the Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, an animated movie that Chu will direct with Jill Culton. 

A Crazy Rich Asians musical is also in the offing, he says.

But right now, his focus is on getting Wicked: For Good ready which Universal will release on November 21, 2025. “The second act gets meatier. If you’re in love with this relationship [between Elphaba and Glinda], that relationships gets messy and complicated where Elphba has a made a choice … and we’re in a moment where Glinda is ready to pop her bubble and confront the things, or is she not?”

Wicked: For Good also explores the notion of what is home? “Why defend a home that doesn’t even want you Is it worth it? Why do you love that place? These are things that we have to decide for ourselves now,” Chu ponders.

Wicked is movie gold. Part One has, to date, garnered worldwide box office receipts of over $635 million, an earth-shattering record for an adaption of a Broadway musical, says my box office guru colleague Nancy Tartaglione.

You have to admire Universal’s strategy in leaving Wicked in theaters while also shifting it, as of New Year’s Eve, to digital platforms. You can purchase the film for $29.99 or rent it for $19.99. 

And later into 2025, Universal will put Wicked on its Peacock streamer.

For theater kids, grownups even, Wicked’s a serial repeater, and they’ll keep zooming through Erivo’s meltingly heartbreaking realization of “The Wizard and I” and “I’m Not That Girl,” her soaring, defiant “Defying Gravity,” Grande’s plucky “Popular,” Jonathan Bailey’s seemingly effortlessly carefree “Dancing Through Life” and the tearful duet performed by Elphaba and Glinda in the Ozdust ballroom.

Then, by next November, fans will be well primed for Wicked: For Good.

Wicked is clearly the show with the witch that keeps on giving.