Culture

When director Jon M. Chu shared that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo had been cast as Galinda and Elphaba, respectively, in the long-awaited movie adaptation of Broadway’s smash musical Wicked back in Nov. 2021, reactions were mixed. No one doubted Erivo’s thespian credentials: She’d won a Tony (lead actress, musical) for The Color Purple in 2016 and been nominated for a best actress Oscar in 2019 for playing abolitionist Harriet Tubman in Harriet. But Grande? Well, Ari’s pop career was unimpugnable – she’d released the acclaimed, Billboard 200-topping Positions a year prior to the announcement and topped the Billboard Hot 100 just months earlier on a remix of The Weeknd’s “Save Your Tears” – but her acting credits were a different matter entirely.

It wasn’t that her résumé was slim. Between Victorious and Sam & Cat, Grande had been a consistent presence on Nickelodeon in the first half of the ‘10s. During the second half of that decade, Grande – who by then had earned her spot on pop music’s A-list – continued to flex her acting chops in small parts, getting killed in 2015’s Scream Queens, co-starring in Hairspray Live!, hosting Saturday Night Live and making a cameo in Zoolander 2 (all 2016).

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So it wasn’t that audiences hadn’t seen her act – it was that we hadn’t seen her act too far afield of the bubbly, ditzy Cat Valentine of her Nickelodeon days. A month after the Wicked casting was revealed, Grande showed a bit more range in the love-it-or-hate-it Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up, but considering that she was playing a pop star, it didn’t exactly assuage Wicked fan fears that Grande wasn’t qualified for one of the most beloved, sought-after roles in modern musical history.

Yes, Galinda/Glinda (the “Ga” is silent by the end of the musical) is both giddy and scatterbrained – two traits Grande excels at portraying – but Kristin Chenoweth’s iconic, Tony-nominated work in Wicked established that to play the role, you needed depth, layers and razor-sharp comedic timing. No one with ears could question Grande’s pipes, but based on her acting credits, we simply didn’t know if she was capable of filling Chenoweth’s small but mighty heels.

Well, having seen Wicked: Part 1 in theaters, I can say without exaggeration that Grande isn’t just a good witch – she’s sinceriously astonishing. From her first scene – when she descends from the sky to tell the overjoyed Munchkins that the Wicked Witch of the West is dead – it’s abundantly clear that Grande has figured out how to make the role her own.

This isn’t Grande the impressionist recreating Chenoweth’s Glinda for the big screen; this is a fresh interpretation delivered with nuance and pathos. As a traditionally beautiful pop star, it’s no surprise that Grande captures Glinda’s more-perfect-than-perfection aura; and as a Nickelodeon veteran, Grande can milk the humor of the Ozian mispronunciations (“confusifying,” etc.) without batting an eyelash. But when a Munchkin confrontationally inquiries about Glinda’s past friendship with the Wicked Witch, forcing the Good Witch to literally burst her own pink bubble, Grande is a revelation.

Caught off guard by the question, Grande’s Glinda falters, struggling to deliver a PR-acceptable reply without betraying a deeply felt kinship with the so-called Wicked Witch. Forcing a smile to cover up the pain and haunted loneliness in her eyes, Grande demonstrates from the go that she knows exactly what makes the Glinda character work: It’s not just about satirizing her superficiality — it’s conveying the sense that the experience of knowing Elphaba has fundamentally changed Glinda’s unthinking faith in institutions, public opinion and people in power. Glinda is a gently tragic figure in many ways, ultimately getting exactly what she wants while simultaneously realizing how hollow it all is.

As with the stage musical, the Wicked film plays out primarily as one lengthy flashback, which takes us back to a pre-epiphany Galinda: narcissistic, ambitious, a bit cruel, self-promoting and unhindered by one iota of self-awareness. Wicked touches on weighty themes, yes, but it’s not a Shakespearean tragedy, so all of that is naturally played for laughs, and Grande eats up every syllable, hair flip and vapid smile. She soars in the vocal showcase “Popular” – nailing some hair-raising high notes toward the end while putting her own stamp on Chenoweth’s best-known song – but more importantly, she delivers the laughs. Like a Golden Era Hollywood pro, Grande is luminous onscreen while balancing choreography and comedy, alternately subtle and silly in her performance of this winking celebration of conformity. When Wicked hits streamers, expect viewers to hit rewind more than once on this scene.

Any successful staging of Wicked needs a push-pull chemistry between the two leads, and Erivo’s Elphaba exudes a potent mixture of warmth, longing and self-loathing in the role. (It goes without saying that Erivo sings the absolute hell out of every song.) From bristling irritation to empathy and affection, her feelings toward Galinda evolve in a way that feels real and relatable — even in a musical with talking goats and Winkie princes.

When it’s time for Elphaba’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” Erivo is stunning, overcoming disillusionment to find her self-confidence and purpose while giving the film it’s pounding, wounded heart. Grande provides deft, subtle support; these characters are on the same page morally but wired too differently to follow the same path, and that tension is magnificently acted. (Grande obviously knows “Yes, And?” as more than just a song title.)

Skeptics of Grande’s acting abilities might insist that while she soars in this role, it’s more a case of perfect casting than impressive acting. But from the opening scene to the climatic finale, Grande goes so much deeper than just playing a shallow, popular girl for laughs – she takes us on a journey that reveals the hopes, disappointments, compromises and realizations of a surprisingly three-dimensional character. Some pop stars turned actors acquit themselves competently on the big screen, but like Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born, this performance signals the arrival of a formidable cinematic talent with a lot more to show us.