Cynthia Erivo can relate to “Elvis” actor Austin Butler and “Armand” actress Renate Reinsve: It turns out throwing yourself fully into a performance could leave you bed-ridden.
Erivo said during the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” that even just auditioning for musical adaptation “Wicked” left her ill. The audition was three hours long, and Tony winner Erivo had to recoup after it.
“Oh, I was very ill by the end of it,” Erivo said. “I was in bed for the next week, for like four days, with 104 fever.”
Erivo plays Elphaba (later known as the Wicked Witch of the West) alongside Ariana Grande’s Glinda. The ensemble film co-stars Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Peter Dinklage, Ethan Slater, and Bowen Yang, who also said that the production left him ailing.
Erivo previously told the New York Times that she was glad Grande was cast alongside her. Amanda Seyfried, Dove Cameron, and Reneé Rapp had also auditioned for the role of Glinda.
“Thank goodness, because it was not the two ladies that I was auditioning with,” Erivo said without naming which stars she was acting opposite with.
And after wrapping the feature, Erivo said she was “devastated.” Grande agreed, saying, “The whole day was a nightmare. We cried every minute, every hour. We both were in a horrible state for a few days.”
Erivo later told Deadline that she and Grande “connected immediately” on set.
“Our voices really worked together,” Erivo said. “And I think from that moment on, we’ve been building, and it’s been the most fruitful relationship of my life.”
Erivo previously spoke out about a fan-edited poster for the feature. The actress said the fan-made image was “deeply hurtful” to her and also the “wildest, most offensive thing” ever.
“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer…because, without words we communicate with our eyes,” Erivo wrote on her Instagram Stories. “Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”
She continued, “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posting the question, ‘Is your p***[y] green?’ None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
Later, Erivo told Entertainment Tonight that she “probably should have called my friends” to vent instead of making a public statement.
“I’m really protective of the role,” she said. “I’m passionate about it and I know the fans are passionate about it and I think for me it was just like a human moment of wanting to protect little Elphaba, and it was like a human moment.”
