Wicked star Cynthia Erivo has some thoughts about that time she physically removed a man who grabbed her co-star Ariana Grande at a premiere - and she's not thrilled that the internet turned her into a bodyguard meme. In an interview with Variety, Erivo detailed the terrifying moment at Universal Studios Singapore when Johnson Wen jumped a barrier and latched onto Grande, prompting Erivo to spring into action because, as she put it, 'Nobody moved. Nobody moved. So I moved because my brain went, ‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’'
Erivo emphasized that the incident was genuinely scary: '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.' Wen, who has a history of disrupting public events, was sentenced to nine days in jail.
The online response, however, focused less on the breach of safety and more on suggesting Erivo was Grande's 'bodyguard' - a characterization Erivo finds rooted in racism. 'I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women,' she said. '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 co-star 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.'
Erivo admitted the reaction made her reluctant to campaign for Oscars for Wicked: For Good, which has underperformed compared to its predecessor - taking $541m (£404m) worldwide with zero Oscar nominations versus the first film's $765m (£571m) and two wins. 'I just felt like my humanity had been bastardised,' she said. 'It 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.' So, in a just world, she'd be celebrated for protecting her co-star; instead, she's considering skipping the whole awards circus.