Taking over as enormous a property as “Wicked” meant juggling many balls within the air on the identical time for director Jon M. Chu. Not solely did he must honor the unique stage musical and its followers, however he additionally needed to contemplate the cinematic legacy of “The Wizard of Oz” and the way “Wicked” matches into it. He needed to steadiness singing, dancing, spectacle, and emotional catharsis and knew whichever actresses he forged to take the reins of witches Elphaba and Glinda must do the identical. As to not overshadow the fabric, Chu admitted in a current interview with SFX Journal that he initially thought-about casting unknowns within the half.
“I wanted to have a very clear slate coming into ‘Wicked,’” stated Chu. “It’s a big enough property on its own, so we can discover two people. I was like, ‘We’re gonna find no-namers’. But then we got calls from all these great actresses who wanted to audition and we saw everybody, and they were all really great. Anyone could have done this role, except there were two people who were meant to do this role, for this particular movie at this particular time.”
Chu, after all, is talking of pop sensation Ariana Grande and Tony-winning movie and theater actress Cynthia Erivo. In elaborating on the casting course of, Chu defined that touchdown on Grande and Erivo in the end got here all the way down to their management over the music.
“What we found out when we were auditioning everyone, was that the songs are so important in this movie, and so emotionally important to this movie, that the person who’s doing it has to get into song and out of song so easily that it’s like butter, like you don’t even notice it,” he stated. “That means having good chops in their skill set.”
Along with Grande and Erivo, the movie additionally options “Saturday Night Live” comic Bowen Yang as a faculty good friend named Pfannee. Whereas chatting with IndieWire on the Las Culturistas Tradition Awards this previous summer time, Yang expressed admiration for Chu and the way he dealt with manufacturing on “Wicked.”
“My biggest lesson in working with Jon is that the scale of the movie has nothing to do with the intimacy of it — with what it’s trying to do, with the story that’s being told, at the end of the day, or just about the emotional environment of set,” Yang stated. “Everyone was so taken care of. No one’s bigger than ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ No one’s bigger than Oz itself. Everyone was there completely humbled and Jon really didn’t push. He just kind of let that cultivate itself and I’m so lucky that I got to be minimally involved in it as I was. He’s such a good director and the scale doesn’t ever actually scale up with the word.”
Common Photos releases “Wicked” in theaters on November 22.
