Next week, families across the country will gather around the dining-room table and give thanks for their blessings. This Thanksgiving, I am feeling intensely grateful for the Wicked press tour.
On Thursday, the Wicked movie hit theaters in wide release, marking the end of a 14-year development process, a nearly two-year shooting process, an extremely impressive Universal marketing push, and the most emotionally exhausting press tour known to man. Part of that was due to the drama in the months leading up to the film, as Ariana Grande embarked on a high-profile romance with her very recently separated co-star and Cynthia Erivo lashed out at a fan who edited a poster to make it look more like the Broadway version, claiming they were trying to “erase” her. But it’s also because, to the average observer, Erivo and Grande simply could not help but be extremely weird.
In almost every single interview about the movie, Erivo and Grande have behaved like preteen girls on the last day of camp, exchanging their AIM contact info over tear-stained Lisa Frank notebooks. They regularly dissolve into tears in response to seemingly innocuous questions, like whether they enjoyed working with each other (the answer, apparently, was yes) or what they did when they weren’t shooting. In perhaps the most bizarre clip to circulate so far, an interviewer from Out informs Erivo that fans are making videos inspired by —or “holding space for” — the song “Defying Gravity” (something that has been happening for approximately the last 20 years, or as long as little gay kids from New Rochelle have had access to modems). “I didn’t know that was happening,” Erivo says, as Grande nods sagely and grips her finger for support. “That’s really powerful. That’s what I wanted.”
Many on social media found Grande and Erivo’s behavior puzzling, if not outright cringe, making TikToks pretending to be them sobbing after an interviewer asked what they had for lunch that day. Others delved into conspiracy theories, claiming the co-stars are so emotional because they’re simply in love, or that the two are in the throes of a personal crisis.
But as someone who went to a performing-arts camp for four years, I can tell you exactly what’s going on here. Grande and Erivo are behaving the exact same way the two leads in your senior-year production of Legally Blonde do when they’re in tech rehearsals and carrying vocal rest whiteboards and they’re finally realizing that one of them is going to Carnegie Mellon next year while the other is going to BoCo. It’s a level of psychic stress that no one who hasn’t been outside that situation can really understand, akin to undergoing combat training in the Marine Corps or attending a Renaissance Fair with a bunch of fire eaters who have done too many mushrooms. It’s a world that is so grueling and insular that it truly feels like there’s nothing outside the universe of your show and your castmates. In fact, if I were interviewing Grande and Erivo on the press tour, I’d probably ask them if they knew the results of the presidential election. I’d bet money they don’t, and you know what? Why should they? They were busy holding space for “Defying Gravity.”
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are huge stars, but ultimately, they’re theater kids. They live on green tea and Ricola lozenges and do shots of olive oil before vocal warm-ups. They are obsessed with the opinions of random BroadwayWorld commenters with usernames like PhantomPhanatic4. And they are singularly consumed by the prospect of hooking up with the one straight tenor in the cast, even if he looks like the Keebler elf king. They’ll have their moment of clarity after the press tour wraps, when they come back to Earth and realize that no, the waitstaff of your local Denny’s doesn’t care if you can hit an F5 or if you know all the words to “La Vie Bohème.” But for now they’re ensconced in the stratosphere of their own shared delusion, and honestly, God bless them for that. It’s a level of annoying that is almost impossible to achieve, and we’re going to miss it when it’s gone.
Fortunately, this isn’t the end for the Wicked press tour. Wicked: Part Two, the second half of the adaptation, is slated for release in November 2025, whereupon Erivo and Grande will have to do this all over again.
