Cynthia Erivo has spoken candidly about how her instinct to protect co-star Ariana Grande during the Wicked press tour in late 2024 was twisted into a joke that exposed what she calls the “insidious nature” of how black women are perceived.
The incident that sparked the conversation happened when a fan rushed towards the two stars on a red carpet, and Erivo stepped in front of Grande. What followed was a wave of online mockery framing Erivo as Grande’s bodyguard, with the jokes zeroing in on her physique, her shaved head and her size relative to her co-star.
In a recent Variety interview, Erivo confronted that response head-on.
Cynthia Erivo on being reduced to a bodyguard
“I just felt like my humanity had been bastardised,” Erivo said in the interview. She went further, unpacking exactly what the jokes were built on.
“It was my physique, it was my shape, it was the fact that I was bald,” she said.
“There was this assumption that I was bigger than my co-star and so I had to be controlling or protecting.”
The directness of the response landed because it named the thing most of the commentary had been tiptoeing around.
Her broader point was not just about one moment on a red carpet.
“I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view black women,” she said.
The observation sat in the middle of a larger conversation about how black women’s physical presence is consistently misread, and how an act as instinctive as stepping in front of a friend could be repackaged as something aggressive or domineering.
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande: the friendship that was never believed
Erivo also used the interview to push back on a narrative that ran parallel to the bodyguard jokes, which was that she and Grande were not actually close, that the warmth between them was performed for the cameras.
“I think that people didn’t really believe that we were actually friends,” she said.
The reality, according to Erivo, is that the two made a deliberate effort to build a real relationship from the start of production and still text almost every day.
The friendship formed under intense production conditions on the Wicked film, directed by Jon M. Chu, which became one of the biggest cinema stories of 2024.
Both actresses earned significant award season attention for their performances, and their public dynamic was part of the film’s promotion throughout. The scrutiny of that dynamic, including the questions about whether a black woman and a white woman could genuinely be that close, was a thread Erivo clearly felt needed addressing.
What Erivo has said and where things stand
Erivo’s interview is already generating significant conversation online, with the clips spreading quickly.
She has not announced a follow-up project tied to the Wicked universe at this stage, though a Wicked Part Two, subtitled For Good, is scheduled for release in November 2026.
Whether or not that press cycle reopens any of these conversations remains to be seen, but Erivo has made it clear she is not interested in letting the distortions stand unchallenged.
