I rolled my eyes at the Wicked press tour too. Cynthia Erivo's answer made me rethink it
Two years of holding space, held fingers and mid-interview tears turned a movie campaign into a meme economy. The actress at the center of it finally explained what we were actually looking at.
For two years I consumed the Wicked press tour the way most of the internet did: as content about the content. Holding space for the lyrics of "Defying Gravity." The held finger. Ariana Grande going glassy mid-answer while Cynthia Erivo gripped her hand. I rolled my eyes with everyone else, and the campaigns kept providing — through the first film's $756 million and through Wicked: For Good opening to $226 million worldwide and crossing half a billion by New Year's.
Now Erivo has addressed the whole phenomenon, in an interview with Stylist, and her explanation is more uncomfortable for us than for her.
"At first, I think people didn't understand how it was possible for two women to be friends — close — and not lovers."
— Cynthia Erivo, to Stylist
People, she said, "either thought we were putting it on for the cameras or that we were lovers" — those were the only two readings on offer. Her diagnosis of why: "there's such little conversation around platonic female friendship that is deep and real."
Sit with how accurate that is as a description of the discourse. Every meme had to resolve the friendship into something else — a bit, a romance, or the most popular template of all: Erivo as the intense, much older woman exerting influence over a fragile, naive Grande. That framing powered thousands of posts, and it dissolves on contact with a calendar. Erivo is 39. Grande is 33.
The "much older woman" of two years of memes is six years older than her "naive" co-star.
The reading also required ignoring who these two are professionally. Erivo came up through the West End and Broadway with a Tony for The Color Purple; Grande was on Broadway at 15. They emote like theater people because they are theater people — the register the internet kept flagging as performance is the only register either of them has ever worked in.
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The night nobody could call it content
If the sincerity were staged, it had one unscripted stress test. At the Wicked: For Good premiere in Singapore last November, an influencer vaulted the barricade and grabbed Grande; Erivo was on him before security was, prying him off while Michelle Yeoh pulled Grande clear. He got nine days in jail. Erivo told TODAY afterward: "I wasn't really thinking. I just wanted to make sure my friend was safe."
Nobody choreographs a barricade jump into a press tour. The reflex we'd spent a year laughing at as performance turned out to be the operating system, and the performance-theory of this friendship has never recovered from that clip. Reading Erivo's interview with that night in mind, the eye-rolling era looks like what she says it was: an audience that had no category for what it was watching, filing sincerity under cringe because cringe was the nearest available folder.
These two will stand on a carpet together again — awards season guarantees it. The jokes will show up too, because the templates exist. But the expiration dates have quietly switched: the press tour we mocked produced a billion-plus dollars and one genuinely protective friendship, and the commentary produced memes that now read as a crowd confidently misidentifying the realest thing on camera.
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