Wicked star Cynthia Erivo has said that reactions to the incident at the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good, in which she stepped in to fend off a red-carpet invader who grabbed co-star Ariana Grande, revealed “the insidious nature of how we view Black women” and put her off campaigning for Oscars.
In an interview with Variety, Erivo said that she and Grande were “terrified” when Johnson Wen jumped a barrier at Universal Studios Singapore and rushed towards them. “Nobody moved. Nobody moved. So I moved because my brain went, ‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’ … And what people couldn’t see is that he wouldn’t let go [of Grande]. He wouldn’t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off.”
Erivo added: “A stranger is a stranger. Personal space is still personal space. It doesn’t belong to anyone, even if you feel you know the person,” she says. “In that moment, we were all terrified.” Wen, who has a history of disrupting public events, was sentenced to nine days in jail.
The incident triggered a huge response on social media, including suggestions that Erivo was Grande’s “bodyguard” – something to which Erivo objects. “I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women. And I’m sure people will read this and think, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, it’s not about that.’ But it is. Because that’s what was being made fun of. It was my physique; it was my shape; it was the fact that I was bald; it was about what I looked like. And because of that, there was this assumption that I was bigger than my co-star and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role. I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around.”
The first Wicked film took $765m (£571m) in box office receipts worldwide on its release in 2024 and won two Oscars; the sequel has performed markedly worse, taking $541m (£404m), and received no Oscar nominations.
Saying “I just felt like my humanity had been bastardised,” Erivo said she had been reluctant to campaign for Oscars for Wicked: For Good as a result of reactions to the red-carpet incident. “It felt like something I did instinctively had been made to be something that it simply was not because of the way people see women who look like me, and because of the assumptions that are made, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that, really and truly.
“I didn’t want to put myself through it. I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”
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