Jon M Chu, director of the incoming, much-hyped Wicked, does a good job of not seeming nervous.
“I love talking about this movie,” he burbles. “I’ve been in an edit room. It’s been our secret.”
A neat man, looking younger than his 45 years, the Asian-American sparkles with apparently sincere enthusiasm. Well, I guess he’s been there before. And he’s had more ups than downs. His first feature, Step Up 2: The Streets, from 2008, blew the first film in that dance franchise out of the water. A few years later, Crazy Rich Asians, a rare Hollywood entertainment featuring an almost exclusively Asian cast, was a deserved smash. In The Heights, his take on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breakthrough musical, went down well with critics in 2021 but couldn’t quite crack the postpandemic box-office jitters. He counts as a youngish veteran.
Still, a lot is resting on Wicked. Stephen Schwartz’s original stage show, a riff on The Wizard of Oz, is one of only three productions to take more than $1 billion at the Broadway box office. Just The Lion King has made more on the Great White Way. More importantly, the tale of exclusion and resistance has, as it has travelled the world, become an empowering legend for fans of all ages. There will be many eager eyes on the film.
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“I have a lot of gratitude for having the opportunity to make this,” Chu tells me. “I have loved this show for over 20 years. I saw it before it went on Broadway. So I felt I was part of a ‘patient zero’ pool of people who saw it with no expectations whatsoever. I remember thinking, This is a movie already. So, jumping into it as a director, you have to withstand the pressures of what people expect from you. Everyone’s whispering behind your back at what a terrible decision this is or that was.”
There was a little of that when Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were announced as leads for Wicked. The musical is, essentially, an origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West. Following a prologue in which the people of Oz celebrate that figure’s death – the end of the classic 1939 film, of course – Glinda the Good, formerly Galinda, tells us how, as a girl, she was friendly with the deceased, then called Elphaba, before events drove them apart. The key point here is that Elphaba is essentially the hero. She is the odd girl or boy at school who retreats into outsider aesthetics. The shiny, pink Galinda stands in for all the popular kids. She gets the attention. But Elphaba gets to fly.
“It’s empowering to see somebody who feels othered, but who’s protecting other people who are marginalised,” Chu agrees. “We’re all both Elphaba and Galinda. We want to be Elphaba who’s able to fly, but, in a weird way, we’re all still Galinda – waiting to understand things. Waiting to pop our bubbles. Because we can all ignore things too. We get on with our lives. It meets us where we’re at.”
There was inevitably some grumbling among Wicked superfans when Erivo, the versatile English actor, and Grande, the sweet-voiced pop chanteuse, were cast as Elphaba and Galinda. The complaints were vague. Erivo, who sang in The Color Purple on Broadway, certainly has the experience. Grande has a famously resonant voice. What was the issue?
“They were both on Broadway,” Chu confirms. “Cynthia won a Tony for that. They are musical-theatre people. But they’ve also had other careers that have blossomed from that. I wanted to get no-namers at first. I didn’t want stars. ‘Wicked is big enough. We get the opportunity to discover someone. These are star-making roles. Let’s go find new people.’ What I found quickly was that these songs are very difficult. You need people who have a lot of experience and who know how to weave in and out of dialogue. They need acting experience.”
Chu goes on to explain that there were no unconditional offers to actors. Everyone had to audition for their part. He admits that he didn’t know if Grande would have the commitment for such a demanding task. But she won him over immediately.
“The moment she dropped in I thought, I’d never seen her like this before,” he says. “That’s what’s exciting. And every time she came in, she was the most interesting person in the room. Of course, she has the voice. That was the easy part. But she was Galinda. She dropped into this role. And to me it felt like a discovery.”
Erivo, from south London, has, since graduating from Rada, in 2010, knocked up a host of distinguished credits on stage and screen. As Chu notes, she won a Tony for The Color Purple. But she would not have been top of many lists to take over the role created by Idina Menzel in 2003.
“For Cynthia, it was, oh, they don’t know she can be this. To me, she felt like a little kid singing The Wizard and I. Because usually she’s so iconic and ... um ...”
Statuesque?
“Yes, statuesque. But she came in T-shirt and jeans. I knew they both had the power and the understanding of what it took.”
Let’s address a few of the elephants in the room. The current film, though it says just “Wicked” on the poster, is an adaptation of only the first act. You’ll need to wait another 12 months for the conclusion. When the news was announced there was much rolling of eyes. Chu has always argued this was an artistic choice, but, let’s be frank, Universal Pictures will (presuming it’s a hit) be happy about having two revenue streams. Right?
“Ha ha. Maybe, maybe,” he says, sportingly. “I came in with the debate already going on. As a director, when you first come in you get two weeks to make radical decisions. That thing, to me, was the bottleneck that was holding the whole movie up. We have to make a decision now. We’ll never get two great movies if we keep hedging our bets. We just have to decide now.”
That does mean, however, there is more pressure on that crucial opening weekend. Particularly in the United States. Gladiator II, arriving a week later than in the rest of the world, is up against it. (Attempts to ape Barbenheimer with Wickedator haven’t really taken off.) It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving. The studio will be gutted if Wicked flops and the second half turns out to be a white elephant. Am I making him nervous yet?
“I have to make the best movie I can,” he says. “So that’s where my head is at. Of course, I want to be fiscally responsible. That’s my job. Also, as a director, we are asking Universal to give us a good amount of money to build this world. We’re all partners in that.”
Here’s another thing. As the film progressed I was reminded that a political backstory has Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard, an empty fraud here just as he was in the 1939 flick, imposing a form of philistine tyranny throughout the land. I can see Chu knows where I’m going with this. The production team can’t have known how the US election would work out.
“He’s gaslighting a whole culture about a woman for challenging him and keeping a whole group of people speechless?” Chu says of the Wizard (and maybe someone else).
Neither of us has mentioned Donald Trump. We don’t need to.
“We always said it was prophetic even before all this happened,” Chu says. “Even when Wicked was written, in 2001 or 2002, 9/11 had just happened and world was about to go to war. It was the same questions.”
At any rate, as we speak, the advance sales for Wicked are huge. I suspect Chu is going to be all right. I would guess he thinks so too.
“I’ve been around for a long time,” he says, laughing. “With Crazy Rich Asians, there was a moment where I felt I belonged. That was the moment I thought, I don’t have to prove myself to anybody.”
Wicked is in cinemas from Friday, November 22nd
