Obsessed

Ariana Grande Responds to ‘Wicked’ Fan Poster Controversy

‘IT’S COMPLICATED’

The singer’s co-star, Cynthia Erivo, said this week that she found a fan-edited version of the movie poster the “most offensive thing” she had ever seen.

Ariana Grande
Taylor Hill/Taylor Hill/FilmMagic via Getty Images

Ariana Grande has “complicated” feelings about a fan-modified version of the Wicked poster that her co-star in the movie, Cynthia Erivo, slammed this week as “the wildest, most offensive thing.”

Asked to weigh in on the controversy by Variety on Saturday at the Academy Museum Gala, Grande shared her mixed emotions about content generated by artificial intelligence.

“I think it’s very complicated because I find AI so conflicting and troublesome sometimes, but I think it’s just kind of such a massive adjustment period,” she said. “This is something that is so much bigger than us, and the fans are gonna have fun and make their edits.”

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The controversy kicked off on Wednesday, when Erivo took to her Instagram to blast the fan’s poster, which had been photoshopped to more closely resemble the Broadway musical poster.

“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, referring to a meme used by fans of the musical. “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”

The film poster, released by Universal a week earlier, shows Erivo, as her character Elphaba, looking into the camera as Grande, as Glinda, whispers into her ear. While it is an homage to the original Broadway poster, there are key differences—that Erivo’s eyes are visible, for instance, or that her lips are green, rather than red as in the original version.

“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION,” Erivo explained in her post. “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.

“Our poster is an homage, not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me,” she continued. “And that is just deeply hurtful.”

Erivo then shared the Universal film poster “to remind you and cleanse your palette.”

Grande said Saturday that she had “so much respect for my sister, Cynthia, and I love her so much,” reiterating that they were still in “an adjustment period.”

She added, “It’s so much stimulation about something that’s so much bigger than us.”

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