Cynthia Erivo is speaking candidly about the public reaction to her defending Ariana Grande from an intruder at the Wicked: For Good Singapore premiere last year.
Erivo, 39, leapt to Grande’s defense after Australian man Jonathan Wen attempted to rush the actress and singer on the red carpet in November 2025. Wen was subsequently jailed for nine days for being a public nuisance and banned from Singapore.
“Nobody moved. Nobody moved. So I moved because my brain went, ‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’ My immediate reaction was ‘Get him away from us,’” Erivo recalled in an interview with Variety published on Wednesday, May 27. “And what people couldn’t see is that he wouldn’t let go [of Grande]. He wouldn’t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off.”
“A stranger is a stranger. Personal space is still personal space. It doesn’t belong to anyone, even if you feel you know the person. In that moment, we were all terrified,” she added.
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While the actress was praised for her quick thinking, Erivo told the outlet that she was perturbed by some of the online reaction to the incident. Variety noted that the episode “prompted jokes, memes and TikTok videos portraying Erivo as Grande’s ‘bodyguard.’”
Erivo told the outlet, “I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women. And I’m sure people will read this and think, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, it’s not about that.’ But it is. Because that’s what was being made fun of. It was my physique; it was my shape; it was the fact that I was bald; it was about what I looked like. And because of that, there was this assumption that I was bigger than my costar and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role.”
“I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around,” the Oscar nominee added.
The Singapore event, Erivo said, put her off campaigning for an Oscar for Wicked: For Good, in which she reprised her role as Elphaba. (Erivo was previously nominated for Best Actress for 2024’s Wicked.)
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“I think maybe in a way it did [put me off], actually. I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized,” Erivo revealed. “I felt like something I did instinctively had been made to be something that it simply was not because of the way people see women who look like me and because of the assumptions that are made, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that, really and truly. I didn’t want to put myself through it. I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”
She added that “it felt like there was already a sort of upturned nose at the second installment, even though we all knew there was a second film coming and we were just doing our jobs.”
Indeed, while Wicked received 10 Oscar nominations in 2025, the sequel did not garner a single nod earlier this year.
As for possibly appearing in a third Wicked movie, the actress said, “It’s too soon to even begin to have the conversation about it. It would take a lot to get me back to do it. It has to make sense.”
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