Cynthia Erivo thinks a fan’s edit of the recently released Wicked poster is really degrading.
On Wednesday (October 15th) Erivo, 37, took to Instagram to share a photo of the edited poster, which hides her character Elphaba’s face from view.
The fan-created poster attempts to mimic the original animated Broadway poster, where a wide-brimmed hat obscures Elphaba’s eyes.
“The original poster is an illustration. I am a real life human being whose chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer … because without words, we communicate with our eyes,” Erivo stated.
The Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated actress shared that Wicked’s poster “is an homage, not an imitation” of the original Broadway show’s poster. “To edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me,” she wrote. “And that is just deeply hurtful.”
She continued: “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equality to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people post the question ‘is your ***** green’ None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
In a second post of her Instagram stories, Erivo re-shared the film’s official and unedited poster and added, “Let me put this right here to remind you and cleanse your palette.”
The first installment of director John Chu’s two-part Wicked film series stars Erivo and Ariana Grande as the famous witch characters from the original 1995 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Stephen Schwartz first adapted the film into a stage musical that hit Broadway in 2003 and went on to become one of the most beloved and successful Broadway musicals of the 21st Century.
Wicked: Part One – also starring Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Ethan Slater, Peter Dinklage, and Bowen Yang – will be in theaters on November 27th. The film’s film second part is slated for November 25th, 2025.
