Cynthia Erivo points out racial bias in reaction to Wicked Singapore red carpet incident

After Wen jumped the barricade, “Nobody moved. Nobody moved,” says Erivo in an interview with Variety. “So I moved because my brain went, ‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’ My immediate reaction was “Get him away from us.’ 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.”

There were obviously a ton of cameras capturing the incident, and Erivo’s reaction was pretty widely discussed in fandom circles online, especially given how central her relationship with Grande was to Wicked‘s marketing. That discussion, which tended to feature jokes about Erivo being Grande’s bodyguard, still doesn’t sit right with her. “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,” Erivo continues. “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.”

When asked whether the incident made her less willing to promote the movie and to campaign for awards, Erivo says, “Maybe in a way it did, actually.” While Wicked: Part One earned 10 nominations at the Academy Awards, including a Best Actress nod for Erivo, For Good was totally passed over by the Academy. She says she felt like there was an “upturned nose” at the second promo campaign in as many years, “even though we all knew there was a second film coming and we were just doing our jobs.” But specific to the Singapore incident, Erivo says, “I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized. 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, 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.”