Cynthia Erivo Slams ‘Offensive’ & ‘Deeply Hurtful’ Fan Edits of ‘Wicked’ Poster With Ariana Grande
Cynthia Erivo has seen the internet’s Wicked memes, and she’s not a fan.
On Wednesday (Oct. 16), the singer-actress blasted a few of the viral edits of the upcoming film’s new poster, which finds Erivo staring at the camera as costar Ariana Grande whispers in her ear in a reimagining of the original Broadway poster for the Wicked musical. When the new poster dropped earlier this month, however, some fans were unhappy that it wasn’t a more exact recreation, which led to people editing the new poster so that it looked more akin to the original — but Erivo isn’t letting it fly.
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“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen,” said the artist — whose album Ch. 1 Vs. 1 peaked at No 77 on the Top Album Sales chart in 2021 — sharing one of the edits on her Instagram Story. “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 …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,” she continued. “And that is just deeply hurtful.”
Erivo added that the edited posters were “equal to that awful Ai of us fighting” — referring to a viral AI-generated video that animates a fight between the Emmy winner and “Yes, And?” singer using their likenesses on the movie poster — and “equal to” a past meme joking about the color of her famously green-skinned character’s private parts. “None of this is funny,” she wrote. “None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
The Pinocchio star plays Elphaba — aka the Wicked Witch of the West — in the upcoming film duology, the first installment of which hits theaters Nov. 22. Grande is locked in as Glinda the Good Witch, with Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Bowen Yang and Ethan Slater rounding out the cast.
After saying her piece on the edits, Erivo shared the Wicked movie’s actual poster on her Story to “cleanse your palette,” she told viewers. About three hours later, Grande also shared the poster on her own Story.
See the official artwork below.
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