Cynthia Erivo Calls Fan-Made Wicked Poster “Deeply Hurtful”

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While Cynthia Erivo and her co-star Ariana Grande are clearly excited about their film adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical Wicked slated to hit theaters on November 22nd, Erivo has taken issue with a viral fan-edited poster that hides her face and called out some of the memes around the movie.

Oscar-nominated and Tony-winning actress Erivo, who plays Elphaba, has generally been positively engaging with the fans who are eager to see the musical hit the big screen, re-posting plenty of images to her Instagram Stories in recent months. But when some folks online expressed disappointment with the film team’s recreation of the original Broadway poster (which has been in use since Wicked debuted in 2003) by making their own versions, Erivo pushed back.

“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen,” Erivo said of a fan-made edit changing the poster. She also referenced her distaste for a handful of additional jokes that have been circulating online, including AI videos of her fighting Grande. “None of this is funny, none of it is cute. It degrades me.”

The image in question tweaked the new Wicked poster to be closer to the famed Broadway illustration, which includes Elphaba smirking from under her iconic witch’s hat and hides more of Glinda’s side profile. Erivo, however, was not amused.

“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer,” she wrote in the same Instagram post. “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.” Read her full thoughts below.

While it’s reasonable for artists and actors to call out jokes that violate their boundaries, fans were a bit confused by Erivo’s response, as she has been on board with some of the sillier memes that have been making the rounds, happily re-posting many of them until now.

However, she and Grande have been especially vocal about the tight-knit friendship they developed over the course of filming Wicked, and it seems that Erivo found no humor in the AI-generated footage of their characters fighting.

Directed by Jon M. Chu, Wicked also features Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Bowen Yang, Ethan Slater, and more. It’s out in theaters on November 22nd.

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