‘Wicked’ fans edited the upcoming movie’s official poster to hide Cynthia Erivo’s eyes, in line with the famous illustrated poster for the Broadway musical
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/Cynthia-Erivo-Wicked-101624-tout-a640d686a7c946ddacdce01309e85aa1.jpg)
Cynthia Erivo is unhappy with Wicked fans who edited the movie’s official poster to partially hide her face.
On Wednesday, Oct. 16, Erivo, 37, shared a photo on her Instagram Stories of the edited poster, which hides Erivo’s character Elphaba’s eyes from view. The fan-created poster attempts to recreate the iconic illustrated poster used by the original Broadway musical over the last 20 years.
“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your ***** green,’ ” Erivo wrote in a caption to her post. “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION,” she added. “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.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(659x0:661x2):format(webp)/Cynthia-Erivo-Wicked-101624-01-79ce7fa31dfb49f2b25d5b25a7926552.jpg)
Erivo additionally shared in her post that the movie’s poster “is an homage not an imitation” of the original Broadway show’s poster. “To edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me,” she wrote. “And that is just deeply hurtful.”
The actress then re-shared the movie’s official and unedited poster on her Stories, writing in a follow-up post: “Let me put this right here, to remind you and cleanse your palette.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(323x0:325x2):format(webp)/Cynthia-Erivo-Wicked-101624-05-58e08c22c8d84975b1925e7f344e89da.jpg)
In the upcoming two-part adaptation of Wicked, Erivo costars with Ariana Grande, who portrays Glinda, as well as Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Bowen Yang, Keala Settle and Ethan Slater.
The movie is directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) who told PEOPLE in July that adapting Gregory Maguire’s original 1995 novel and the subsequent musical for the big screen allows the new movie to be “more intimate” than the stage show.
“We get the camera two inches from their face, so we can see when they’re lying, when they’re not, or when they’re lying to themselves,” Chu said at the time. “That brings a lot of power to the show that you can’t have on a stage when you have to look forward to the back of the crowd.”
Wicked: Part One is in theaters Nov. 27. The movie’s second part is slated for Nov. 26, 2025.