The great and powerful Cynthia Erivo

NEW YORK

Cynthia Erivo does not believe in “going out” clothes. The British actress, who’s been painting red carpets green for months to promote her star-cementing role in “Wicked,” doesn’t wait for a special occasion to slip into something fancy. She is the occasion.

“Why not?” Erivo asks as she leads me through the maze of luxury showrooms at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue. She’s zipping on and off escalators in buttery leather boots as high as stilts, which the actress tells me could easily be “come downstairs for breakfast” shoes. “Life is both short and long,” she says.

“I’m a maximalist — although I’m a small person,” explains the 5-foot-1 Erivo, who made her mark on the West End before becoming a star on Broadway. “You look great,” calls an awestruck bystander as the 37-year-old sashays past in a voluminous floral skirt and cropped jacket by Tao. Oh this? She threw it together because it made her “feel good.”

“I use my clothes as an introduction. I don’t dress up to hide,” Erivo says. When people look at her, she wants them to think “outside of the box” — light-years outside. She likes to “mess it up a bit” with weird shapes, crazy volume, the off take on femininity. “What no one else wants, I want,” she calls over her shoulder as we jaunt through this high-fashion Emerald City.

“Dare to be. Dare to adventure. There’s frivolity and joy in it. The way I dress is innately queer. I’m trying to be myself,” says Erivo, adding after a knowing pause that her style is meant to be “limitless.”

Somewhere in Erivo’s closet are a pair of carpet pants — as in, pants made from carpet — because again, why not? She has no idea when or where she’s going to wear them. Maybe on a lazy Sunday trip to the living room sofa? The point is, she certainly won’t wait for permission.

Erivo feels like a rare gift. She’s out there delivering soul-shaking standards with a septum ring and a full set. And also in her own world — an openly queer actress and singer who nevertheless guards her private life. Despite being “Black, bald-headed, pierced and queer” — as she put it during a recent awards ceremony — Erivo has been embraced by the popular kids (every major award but an Oscar — so far). Still, she has always, always felt “outside the loop.”

“Wicked” might just close it. She plays Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, but for now just a green girl in a funny hat poised to overcome bigotry and step into her own power. Meanwhile, the long road to opening weekend has been like a second coming for Erivo, who’s never been exposed to so large and zealous an audience, and who seems to be shedding layer after layer with each step to become more unapologetically herself.

Arriving in theaters on Friday, “Wicked” is a prequel to “The Wizard of Oz” that reimagines the Wicked Witch as a misunderstood activist come to save Oz from an authoritarian fraudster — and subverts what we thought we knew about popular culture’s most recognizable female villain. Based on the beloved 2003 musical (derived from the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire), the story takes off with a parable of two young women — the muted green Elphaba (Erivo) and the bubbly pink Glinda (Ariana Grande) — who look past their thin differences to become unlikely besties.

“Defying Gravity” is Elphaba’s earth-shattering signature number about embracing one’s innate magical power. It’s a song practically engineered to produce goose bumps, in which an outcast is “through accepting limits.” In the “Wicked” movie — the first of two — Erivo performs the song like a vocal defibrillator, making your entire body buzz as she sings its iconic closing run.

“The proclamation of ‘Defying Gravity,’ in essence, is the idea that you defy the possibilities that are set for you. I think I’ve been doing and trying to do that my whole life,” Erivo says. “So I understand how hard that can be and what work that takes and how heavy that can feel, but also how freeing and liberating that can be, too. So when we get to a point where I can sing those words, I mean it.”

So, limitless.

Since arriving from across the pond in 2015 to star as Celie in the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” the Londoner has earned an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy and an Oscar nomination. In 2017, Erivo stepped onto a film set for the first time to appear opposite Viola Davis in Steve McQueen’s heist movie “Widows.” In 2019, she starred as American hero Harriet Tubman in Kasi Lemmons’s “Harriet” — for which she earned an Academy Award nod for best actress.

When people talk about Erivo, the word “powerhouse” plays on repeat.

“In the metaphysical sense of the word I do feel powerful,” Erivo says once we’ve settled into a small dressing room with a rack of clothes pulled by Randall Perkins, a stylist who got a heads-up from Erivo that she might be doing some browsing.

These days, “I have a real sort of ownership of who I am and what I want. I have some control over how things happen for myself, which is a really powerful thing,” says Erivo, who has her own production company and is most excited to create projects for future stars. Then the actress puts it in pop-culture parlance, “But as the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility.”

In practical terms, on the set of “Wicked,” that meant cookies.

Mondays were always hard on a $145 million production with nearly as many moving parts. Some weeks, Sundays were the only real time off. Folks were tired-tired. As No. 1 on the call sheet, Erivo saw it as part of her job to keep the vibe up. So she’d bake cookies — trays of chocolate chip, white chocolate, oatmeal raisin, and double chocolate for the vegans.

“That burst of like, ‘Oh there’s something sweet!’ — it costs nothing. But it does something to the energy immediately,” Erivo says. “It’s impossible to do something that big if it just is miserable. Everybody’s trying their best and everyone is exhausted. So in order to show up to work, happy and exhausted, we have to try.”

Another responsibility Erivo relished? Being nosy. She tried to understand every job, from the assistant director calling “cut!” to the wind-machine operator. “That’s my commitment to myself to make sure that everyone feels seen and acknowledged,” she says. It was “a bit jarring at first” for “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “In the Heights”). “It’s like, ‘We got this. Don’t worry. You just figure out your own thing,’” he says. But Chu, a veteran of big-budget spectacles, learned to lean into his star’s caretaking instincts.

“Sometimes when you’re making a movie with such pressure, you forget the humanity of it. But by her reminding us, it only embedded itself into the DNA of the movie,” Chu says.

Chu almost looked past Erivo for the part of Elphaba, made famous onstage by Idina Menzel. His instinct was to hire no-names for the two starring roles, but it became clear that songs like “Defying Gravity,” “Popular” and “The Wizard and I” are actually “really f---ing hard.” They demand pros.

Grande, a bona fide pop princess with theater-kid roots, hadn’t been shy about pursuing the role of Glinda with gusto, coming in to read and sing nearly half a dozen times. Erivo, so much like Elphaba, was much more judicious with her energy. The actress told her team she didn’t want to hear any casting-rumor scuttlebutt unless she was being seriously considered.

“I resisted the call,” Chu says. “I always saw her as this dignified, untouchable icon.” But the two started having conversations about art, life and what it means to stare longingly at a yellow brick road that wasn’t built for you. Erivo officially auditioned for “Wicked” the day after she performed in a sold-out post-pandemic gala with the Los Angeles Philharmonic where she sang Broadway classics like “Somewhere” from “West Side Story” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl.” She showed up in jeans and a T-shirt and belted out “The Wizard and I.”

“She took the role,” Chu says. “Yeah, it wasn’t like we decided. She really took it from our hands like, thank you very much.”

Erivo has synesthesia, a condition in which one’s sensory experiences cross with one another — like tasting words or smelling pictures. She sees color when she hears music.

“Sometimes it’s really loud. Other times it’s quite quiet and like other times” — when she’s backed by a big orchestra — “it’s a very visceral experience,” explains Erivo.

“Wicked,” then, is a bit like her mind. Maximalist. Bursting with sounds and colors. Everything with extra oomph, even the words. (In this Oz, it’s not “congratulations.” It’s “congratu-LOW-shuns.”) Filming it over a year in England was equally all-consuming, with too many “wow” moments to count. The 9 million tulips Chu had planted. The 16-ton working train headed for Emerald City.

“My brain was like, ‘Oh, this is chunky. We’re not playing here,’” recalls Erivo. “I kept having realizations of that over and over again — like the first time you get into a harness … ‘Oh okay, I’m flying.’”

Was all that sensory overload … overwhelming? Nah, she says. She tackles Oz-sized tasks by going into “right, what’s next?” mode.

Erivo did her own stunts, obviously — following months of prep. She would hit the treadmill at 3 a.m., running for “however long I need to run for” to make sure she could fly and sing live. She scheduled plenty of time to rehearse the music and had a vocal coach on set who was so familiar with Erivo’s voice she could tell when it needed rest.

And: She went green.

Erivo and Chu had weighed using CGI to get her skin from its natural sepia to Elphaba’s sage. Not good enough. So she added getting up three hours early to the list.

“Point blank and the period I knew I was going to be green,” Erivo says. “It changes the genetic makeup of the room when people are looking at a green person with green eyes and freckles. I wanted to be able to have the fullest experience of this as I possibly could so that everyone else could have the fullest experience as well.”

There’s working hard and there’s Erivo’s version. Her commitment to the tough way, her co-stars say, rubs off. Actress Michelle Yeoh, who plays Elphaba’s mentor and teacher Madame Morrible, was terrified of having to sing. It was Erivo who held her hand through their first duet and said, “Michelle, I know you can do it. Just sing and let your voice come out.”

“She cares for people,” Yeoh says. “She feels your anxiety and she feels the need to comfort you and give you that confidence. And I’ve always loved Cynthia for that.”

According to Danielle Brooks, who also starred in “The Color Purple,” Erivo’s commitment to the craft was legend. “Cynthia has a crazy work ethic,” Brooks says. “The girl was doing marathons while doing two shows a day. There was always this crazy focus.”

Brooks recently came across a letter Erivo wrote her to mark the end of Brooks’s Broadway run. The last line: “Next stop the Oscars.” Now they both have been nominated — Brooks for the 2023 film version of “The Color Purple.” There’s a viral clip of the two actresses swaying in an embrace on the 2024 Oscars red carpet. “A hug of recognition,” Brooks says.

“She’s someone who is not going to back down, a person who will definitely not take no for an answer,” Brooks says. “It’s her willpower — that’s the word.”

Nothing braced director Lemmons for how Erivo showed up to the set of “Harriet.” “She was prepared in every single possible way that an actor could be prepared — physically, mentally, professionally, and she was prepared spiritually.”

But Erivo’s first scene still caught Lemmons off guard. Tubman is racing to freedom with a group of the formerly enslaved. Erivo is an athlete. The woman knows how to run. But Lemmons noticed something different in how she placed one foot in front of the other.

“She ran like Harriet. I can’t even describe it,” says Lemmons, who later asked her star about the choice. “And she said, ‘She’s just a regular woman, but she’s really, really fast.'” That level of attention to detail astonished Lemmons. “Cynthia is that woman. She’s meticulous. I don’t know, maybe meticulous doesn’t quite describe it. There is another level to it.”

Back in the dressing room, Erivo is trying to explain how much Elphaba means to her. How the character isn’t just a costume she can take on or off.

Erivo attended the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She’d auditioned at a mentor’s insistence and “always felt outside of the loop, a little bit odd, a little bit removed from what everyone else was dealing with.” The students at RADA are largely well-to-do, Erivo says, while she was just girl from southwest and east London who put herself through school. The word she chooses is “misfit.”

But there was another misfit, a boy named Michael, who decided she was cool and asked if she’d like to come 'round and sing with him in the piano room sometimes. The duo returned again and again to “Wicked,” which Erivo had never seen onstage. “This feels really good to sing,” she remembers thinking. By the time she graduated in 2010, Erivo knew the score forward and backward.

Erivo doesn’t just feel connected to Elphaba — herself a misfit at a school full of well-heeled initiates — she feels protective of her. She poured her passion, her hurt, her angst, her desire to be seen into the character — a girl on the outside looking in, then on the inside looking around. Someone powerless who finds she’s powerful.

The more the actress thinks about it, the narrower the gap between player and part becomes.

There’s the “horrid” relationship Elphaba has with her father, who rejects her because she’s green. “Then there’s me, and I have my own thing with my father,” says Erivo, who sings about their estrangement in the song “You’re Not Here” on her 2021 album “Ch. 1 Vs. 1.” Her parents, both Nigerian immigrants, split when Erivo was young.

Then there’s the fact that Elphaba couldn’t be more of a woman of color. “Yes, she’s green and I’m a Black woman and we all know what that feels like to be like the only one in the room,” Erivo says. “But outside of that, I’ve always felt different, like not the same as everybody else — ever.”

The closing scene in this first installment of “Wicked” is breathtaking — expect nothing but gasps in the theater. It’s when Elphaba not only realizes how preternaturally powerful she is, but how she’s misplaced her hope for validation. She’s the one who can fly.

That’s the story Erivo’s been telling about Elphaba — and herself. Who needs approval when the air is yours?