Let’s start with a quick recap on the first Wicked film. Its premise: what would the legend of Oz look like, told from the perspective of someone other than that cute but dozy blow-in, Dorothy? The wicked witch, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), is entirely green, and has therefore been ostracised since childhood. Glinda (Ariana Grande), the good witch, is everybody’s princess but, after a time, the two become best friends. I’ll skirt over how the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow come about, suffice to say that, in the film at least, their backstories make perfect and resonant sense (except for the Lion, but never mind). The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is not a good guy – but is he a bad guy? The morals swirl, in an expertly handled way.
The first film left us at the point of discovery that Oz, far from being a magic paradise, was actually built on foundations of discrimination, oppression, enslavement and mendacity – or, if you like things simple, fascism. The fact that the slave-caste is the animal kingdom rather than a human out-group doesn’t make this opulent fantasia feel any less pointedly topical. “Any timeless story feels timely,” director Jon M Chu says, “because it’s about the human condition. When people become too powerful, what happens to the powerless? That cycle, unfortunately, challenges us every few generations, and maybe this is our moment. We’re the adults in the room now.”
Yes, definitely – adults whose hearts lift at the sight of pink and green; who would follow Ariana Grande off a cliff in a synchronised, Busby Berkeley formation; who still break into Defying Gravity whenever they happen to pass Erivo’s secondary school in Streatham, London. The first film was enchanting, the second (called Wicked: For Good) is surprisingly moving. They weigh in, between them, at over five hours. “I just knew it had enough meat in it,” Chu says, nonchalantly.
I went in swinging to this conversation with Chu. It was the Corinthia hotel in London’s Whitehall, on Remembrance Sunday, pomp and pageantry everywhere outside, Chu exuding an air of calm mischief inside. I’ve never seen anyone convey a more rebellious spirit encased in such neat tailoring. I wasn’t swinging at him personally – he’s immensely accomplished, best known for Crazy Rich Asians, though prior to Wicked, the film I couldn’t recommend highly enough would have been his adaptation for screen of In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the Hispanic community in New York.
No, I was gunning for the stage version of Wicked, which was first performed in San Francisco in 2003 – that’s when Chu saw it, with his mum, before it ever got to Broadway. His parents “came to the United States with nothing except for the dream”. His mother was born in Taiwan, his father was born in China. “They started a restaurant, and it’s still there to this day, 55 years later. And I got to do the most American job of all, telling stories in movies, and not just movies, movie musicals. I am proof that the dream is real.” He was still a student and his professors at USC School of Cinematic Arts were telling him: “Don’t write a movie musical, the form is dead.”
The thing is, the films are so superior to the stage musical that I can’t even see how they were inspired by it. It’d be like going to Zippos Circus and getting inspired to make The Greatest Showman. The orchestration is better, the dialogue is wittier, the pace and the plotting and the characters and everything is just a different order of magnitude. “It’s a different thing,” Chu says, diplomatically. “Glinda comes in, and she’s winking at the audience, whose perspective is, ‘Prove to me I should believe in this stuff.’ It’s a very different perspective than in a movie, where the green girl drops into this crazy world, thinking, ‘Where the hell did I just land?’ And she’s us.”
Erivo and Grande seem like the obvious choices for the leads, maybe because they’ve had such a public passion for one another – an undisclosed number of matching tattoos, for instance – or maybe because they both have such striking voices. Their vocals were not pre-recorded for either film, which is particularly impressive given how much time they spend flying. When casting the roles, Chu says cheerfully: “We could have got any singers we wanted, really.” Grande and Erivo had something different, “the connective tissue to a truth”.
He’d originally thought Erivo wouldn’t be interested because she was too edgy, and Grande wouldn’t be right because she was too global. “But when she came in, she wasn’t the pop star Ari, she was Glinda. She was from another planet. I called her in four or five times, I kept thinking, I call bullshit, let’s see her again. And it was just undeniable. Something about the way she sang it, because she’s been through many tragedies recently, I felt she was singing about me.” (This isn’t showbiz hyperbole: Grande has had an appalling run of life events, including the accidental overdose of her ex, Mac Miller, in 2018, and the Manchester Arena bombing the previous year).
“Same with Cynthia,” Chu continues. “I felt like she was singing about me, dreaming about being a director in my dorm room. We were waiting for these two women.” It was quite lucky how much they loved each other, right? “I thought, even if they hate each other, the camera loves their energy.”
From the start of the first movie, there’s this green-phobia as everyday racism, Elphaba sullen and oppressed, Glinda perky with white body supremacy. All that is quite familiar, Disney-ish territory (think Zombies, Descendants); everyone gets to know one another and, after that, they’re nice. But there’s a seam of segregation and oppression that defines the second film, and which has been an ongoing theme of Chu’s film-making. Before he had kids – his first (of five), Willow, with his wife, graphic designer Kristin Hodge, was born in 2017 – “I’d been making movies for 10 years, and it felt great. I didn’t have to answer to anybody. And then I had children, and I want them to live in a world where they’re proud of who they are. So I had to go chase Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights.”
In a deceptively fun way – Crazy Rich Asians was the highest grossing romcom of the 2010s – both films tell a complicated, uncliched story about multiculturalism. “Melting pot is way more difficult than a word,” Chu says. “Melting is not fun. I got to be born in a melting pot, and feel the swirl and actually not even realise that I was melting until much later in my life. And maybe it’s not melting at all. Maybe it’s a soup in which we’re all still our own selves, in the same bowl. Not becoming one thing, but at the same time, knowing that coming together is part of the dream.”
You can very much imagine Chu pitching this epic for the first time, and see exactly why it got green-lit, right at the start of Covid. “Everything was changing around us. Our childhood stories, the possibilities of our childhood, no longer felt like they were guaranteed. Everything was resetting. We felt like strangers in our own homes.”
Another sense in which Wicked: For Good lands at a precisely relevant moment, is that we talk about and experience AI so much, we can’t tell what’s real. “Generative AI was not used on this movie,” Chu says, with some pride. “If you see the camera shake, if you see a dancer and they’re not quite on time, that’s because humans made this. The string that plays just a little bit off-tempo, the wrinkle in her nose, that’s because it’s human-made. The world is part of the message.”
Chu considers himself “on the frontlines, telling one of the biggest stories” in the face of “political upheaval, social upheaval, cultural identity crises all around us”. And if you’re wondering how that stacks up, with a movie-musical about witches, all I can say is you should go and see it. It has a profound sense of purpose.
“Movies are one of the few protected spaces,” he says. “You have to put your phone aside, you sit with friends and strangers, you pay attention for two hours and you see the world through someone else’s eyes. I don’t even spend that much time listening to my loved ones. I feel a grand responsibility – if people are giving me this time, coming into this bubble, I have to use it, to say, ‘Do you see what’s happening on the outside?’”
