‘Wicked’ star Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba Thropp, is lashing out at fans who edited the movie poster to resemble the Broadway original.
The film will follow Thropp’s transformation from a college student with green skin to the infamous Wicked Witch of the West.
Glinda Upland, the Good Witch, is portrayed by Ariana Grande.
After the movie poster was released, several fans edited it to look more like the iconic artwork used to promote the Broadway original. One of those fans was “wickedmexicofans” on Instagram.
Erivo, instead of being flattered by the creativity of the story’s fans, took massive offense to the edits.
Bounding Into Comics reports:
Taking to the auto-deleting ‘Stories’ feature of her personal Instagram account on October 15th, the actress’s first took aim at the above poster edit from Wickedmexicofans and declared that the ‘musical accurate poster’ was “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*** green.”
From there, the actress broke into a all-out rant, declaring, “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION,” she argued. “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. 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.”
However, rather than receiving a one-sided outpouring of support, Erivo instead found her post met not just by her supporters, but also numerous Wicked fans who believed she may have been overreacting to the edit, which they correctly noted were being made not out of malice, but again, out of a desire to see the live-action poster conform with the original Broadway one.
Erivo went on to post the original poster with the caption, “Let me put this right here,to remind you and cleanse your palette.”
None of the other cast members, including Grande, commented on the fan edits.
The film is scheduled to be released in theaters on November 22.
