Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande at the "Wicked: For Good" New York Premiere held at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on Nov. 17, 2025, in New York. John Nacion/Variety
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Cynthia Erivo knows about how popular it was for the internet to dissect her friendship with Wicked costar Ariana Grande last year, something the Tony winner addressed in a Variety cover story published Wednesday (May 27).
While reflecting on the whirlwind promotional run of the Wicked films that lasted throughout 2024 and 2025, Erivo addressed some of the misconceptions about herself and the pop star that ran rampant online for months. “It’s very interesting, watching what people’s perception is versus what the reality actually is,” she told the publication. “Lots of psychologists seated at home deciding who we were, what we were going through, what we were doing and why.”
“I think that people didn’t really believe that we were actually friends,” she continued, noting that she and Grande still text each other just about every day. “But that’s also because people don’t know me very well. If I’m a friend, then I’m a friend. If I’m not, then I’m not.”
The internet’s theories about the costars were wide-ranging, with some commentators speculating that they were romantically involved and others deciding that Erivo and Grande were either too close or secretly competing against each other. It was also common to see netizens comparing the two women’s appearances, especially after the Pinocchio star pushed away a man who’d rushed onto the red carpet at Wicked: For Good‘s Singapore premiere in November and grabbed the “Yes, And?” singer.
“I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women,” Erivo told Variety. “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 costar, 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.”
She added that “in a way,” the incident — which resulted in the perpetrator spending nine days behind bars before he was banned from Singapore — discouraged her from campaigning for Academy Award recognition after the second Wicked film premiered last fall. “I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized,” the performer said. “I 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 … 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.”
Erivo added that “it felt like there was already a sort of upturned nose at the second installment, even though we all knew there was a second film coming and we were just doing our jobs.”
After growing close over the course of working on Wicked and promoting the Jon M. Chu-directed franchise, Grande and the Broadway veteran are now hard at work on different projects. The Victorious alum is gearing up to drop new single “Hate That I Made You Love Me’ on Friday (March 29), while Erivo is starring in a one-woman production of Dracula on the West End.
See Erivo on the cover of Variety below.
