The Making of Wicked: For Good: Behind-the-Scenes of Broadways Biggest Blockbuster

[This story contains spoilers from Wicked: For Good.]

In “No Good Deed,” Elphaba’s big solo number in Wicked: For Good, Cynthia Erivo is shown flying through flames and flying monkeys while belting out the spellbinding song.

In reality, Erivo was doing this while singing live in a harness, with actual flames surrounding her, and being hit by focused jets of air from wind machine tubes. She had spent time rehearsing in the setup to train herself for the moment where she’s quickly brought up about 18 feet in the air and then slowly lowered as well as the general act of singing while flying.

“I’m parallel to the floor, so my feet are off the ground, and I’m basically lying down on my stomach whilst I’m flying, which is also a crazy way to sing,” Erivo says.

Sound Mixer Simon Hayes was in the background, working to keep the mic under the brim, or peak, of her hat out of the wind path.

“I was like, ‘Guys, guys, whatever happens, just don’t hit the peak of her hat,’ ” recalls Hayes.

Wicked: For Good brings back the entire cast from the first film, including Erivo, Ariana Grande, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey and Jeff Goldblum, just one year after the release of Wicked. The story picks up with Erivo’s Elphaba having become demonized by Oz after turning against the Wizard (Goldblum) due to his lies and cruelty toward animals. Grande’s Glinda has aligned herself with the Wizard, but is now contending with that decision, as well as her challenged relationships with Elphaba and her beau, Fiyero (Bailey).

When director Jon M. Chu first joined the project, produced by Universal and Marc Platt, he found himself walking into a long-running debate about whether to make Wicked into one or two films. Scripts for either scenario had previously been written, but neither were quite there yet, and the one-part version was particularly sparse. The idea of having one long film with an intermission was tossed around, but Chu kept pushing in favor of two.

“If we were asking people to believe in the stakes, the emotional stakes, the real-life stakes of these two women, then we needed the time to understand what was at stake. What was their childhood like? What were they being taught, and what was shattered in front of them?” explains Chu.

The creative team then had the challenge of expanding the 60-minute second act of the stage show into a full-length film. The breakthrough for screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox came as they found they could use the second film to hone in on Glinda’s character, flaws and all, with added backstory on her childhood desire for magic.

“We began to realize that we could give a lot more detail and nuance and intimacy to what Glinda was going through, and that everything we would add to Glinda would enhance Elphaba’s arc and journey as well,” says Holzman, who also penned the stage show.

The flashback seen in the film, where a young Glinda is shown unsuccessfully trying to cast a spell at her birthday party, was a surprise to Grande. She had done extensive acting prep to ready herself for Glinda’s dramatic arc in the film, which is shown through long takes and close-ups on Grande in some of Glinda’s worst moments.

“I did not know they were going to have a flashback to her childhood, but it worked out well because it is something I often referenced in my preparation for the role,” Grande says. “When you get to see Glinda triggered by all of these heartbreaking events, you see how these dark moments actually push her towards the light again.”

Elphaba starts in a strong, but isolated position, and moves into emotions of rage and loss, as seen in “No Good Deed,” before accepting that she may no longer belong in Oz.

“We had to build in moments and songs that understand the complexities of home when you’re not from there, or where you don’t feel like you’re from there, which are very current, resonant ideas,” says Chu.

The two films were shot simultaneously — “It was a mind fuck, as they say,” Chu says. To keep track of where they were in the process, Chu built a highly-secure “war room” with a progression of drawings, set models and the colors used in each scene of both movies. The differences were apparent as the last 40 minutes of the first film are set against one long sunset, which transitions into darkness for most of the second film. Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks, a longtime collaborator, also selected intentions to anchor each scene.

“Some of the intentions for the first movie were desire and choice and yearning and longing and dreams, and the second movie was sacrifice and surrender and consequence,” says Brooks.

Grande had a giant, annotated script, as did Erivo, who also wore different perfumes on shoot days to track where she was in her character’s arc. Leading up to filming, the team did extensive prep, including choreographing and rehearsing 20-plus musical numbers. Chu also sat down with the principal actors for long talks about their characters. Once on set, however, he leaned more into experimentation.

“We’re not making the movie on set. We are squeezing the ingredients here. So let’s play,” Chu says.

The director’s playfulness carried over into his envisioning of the song “Wonderful,” in which the Wizard tries to convince Elphaba to join his side. Chu wanted to base the scene around the feeling of awe he had as a child on Disneyland’s Peter Pan ride. Brooks took that direction to heart and spent several days on the ride before filming began. An actual ride, or practical roller coaster, was then built on set to carry Erivo and Grande, who are buckled in and sitting on a broom, from the top of the Wizard’s control room to the bottom.

The scene and the song were also reworked from the Broadway show to include Glinda, after co-writer Fox noted that Elphaba and Glinda spend too much time apart in the second act and that Glinda could be used to convince her to join the Wizard.

“If we thought of doing that in the show, we would have done it,” admits composer Stephen Schwartz. “It’s such a good idea.”

To aid in the expanded character development, Schwartz wrote two new songs for part two. Elphaba’s “No Place Like Home” was written with Erivo’s voice in mind as a means to explore her love for Oz for a scene in the film where the animals she’s trying to save are fleeing.

“I think she’s never belonged, and I think it’s the first time she’s really had to admit it to herself, and she’s really had to ask the question, ‘Why does she keep fighting for a place that doesn’t actually want her there?’ ” Erivo says.

The other song, “The Girl in the Bubble,” comes at a turning point for Glinda, as she decides to break away from the comfort of her old life and help Elphaba. The scene is filmed with the camera and Grande going in and out of parallel mirrors in her apartment — a setup that Brooks found at home by playing around with a shaving mirror — and eventually facing her own reflection in her bubble.

“I wanted it to be quite simple, musically, not showy, but really an internal song. And I wanted the music to be almost folklike, to have Ariana basically using that very quiet and plaintive part of her voice that she has. Though, because it’s the character of Glinda, at some point she has to use her soprano,” says Schwartz.

As Fiyero, Bailey saw his role as reflecting these transitions. This meant leaning into his character’s righteous morality, which mirrors Elphaba’s, and not “softening the blows” when his character questions Glinda about her choices and ultimately leaves her for Elphaba.

“The nuance and the gray areas of morality within these relationships is what makes Wicked a really interesting story,” says Bailey. “I think betrayal is betrayal, and love and forgiveness are passed around with real intricacy. You don’t want to shy away from that.”

Schwartz worked with Grande and Erivo on pre-records of all the vocals, and when shooting first began the actors would sing some takes live and lip sync others. But after seeing those early scenes in the cutting room, Chu gravitated toward live takes and happily found that Erivo and Grande could keep up with the demands of long days of singing. A piano was on set, which fed into their earpieces and allowed them to set their own tempo on solo numbers. Mics were placed in hats, and on the actor’s bodies, in addition to booms, with Hayes sometimes blending vocals from each of the three sources. The majority was sunglive, with pre-records used to enhance chorus numbers.

Cosmetically, Erivo’s makeup had to withstand 12-hour shooting days and the glare of lights. Hair and makeup designer Frances Hannon used a yellow fluorescent-based eye shadow as the foundation for her green skin and airbrushed the color on Erivo in a process that initially took just over two hours and included the application of freckles that faded as the character aged. Actual makeup, rather than CGI, was important for Erivo.

“I wanted to look in the mirror and see this character, Elphaba. I also wanted other people to see it, because I knew that other people’s reactions could inform my behavior as well,” she says.

Elphaba’s costumes follow her story arc, as her archetypal Wicked Witch of the West wardrobe from the end of the first film slowly breaks down over the second film, with her dress disintegrating into a tunic, her cape starting to fray and her broad-brimmed hat eventually being left behind.

“As she’s rising to her most fully realized self, all of those elements are starting to deteriorate,” costume designer Paul Tazewell explains.

Glinda is given a new blue and purple “bubble” dress, which plays on the iridescence of the liquid spheres and also nods to the color of the character’s dress in the Broadway show. With many of Glinda’s outfits, Tazewell wanted to include references to airborne elements, but also a crafted image of being good. This carries over into Glinda’s wedding look, which included a 25-meter-long veil encrusted with butterflies, which were individually cut out and sparkled, and continues onto her skirt and tiara.

For the second film, Hannon also got to transform Ethan Slater’s Boq into the tin man, a five-hour process which also involved a collaboration from several members of the creative team, as they used elements of Nessarose’s (Marissa Bode) office, where the transfiguration spell takes place, to complete the look. This included thimbles as the tips of his fingers and a tray as a breast plate. The joints were added in with visual effects.

“Every shot in the movie is a visual effect shot,” says VFX Supervisor Pablo Helman. In total, there are more than 1,800 such shots in the film, including everything from creating the key tornado scene that brings Dorothy to Oz to turning Erivo’s harness work into realistic flying and making sure the mirror shots in “The Girl in the Bubble” were correctly reflected (a process that took two years).

There was also a 15-person team of actors who were on set playing the flying monkeys, as well as some of the other animals, which were later rendered with digital imagery.

Still, there was a concerted effort to combine those elements with a practical set design. Production designer Nathan Crowley imagined Elphaba’s lair as being intertwined with nature, which meant weaving flexible wood and branches into a large sculptural nest built on a top of a platform on a soundstage. Live plants and moss were also woven in and kept alive by grow lights at night. This and the entire woodland were built on a sound stage, rather than shot outdoors, as the forest needed to include the circular trees that populate Oz.

Outside, in the fields of Norfolk, England, Crowley employed a farmer to plant nine million colorful tulips, which also appear in the first film.

“You feel that the film is handmade because you’ve made it and you’ve sculpted it, and you’ve painted it, and in a way that gives you the nostalgia that Oz needs,” says Crowley.

While there are nods to Oz, due to copyright issues, the film had to make sure references were sourced either from Gregory Maguire’s novel, which provides the basis for the stage musical, or from Frank L. Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is now in the public domain. That’s in part why the ruby slippers from the 1939 The Wizard of Oz film do not appear in these films.

The shooting schedule was at first complicated by COVID-19 regulations and then came to a halt due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. At that point, there were about four weeks left of filming, which included the flying scenes of “Defying Gravity” that appear in the first film, as well as in “No Good Deed.” Erivo had to hold on to those emotions for six months before filming resumed, as Chu, Platt and editor Myron Kerstein used the downtime to identify any missing elements.

During filming, Kerstein built a small screening room to watch the dailies, where he would sit for up to six hours a day, taking the footage in and jotting down notes. The idea was to let the 250 hours of footage wash over him and see what he responded to emotionally, which he used to later guide his edits. Often, Kerstein found he responded to the unexpected takes, such as the moment where Grande crinkles her nose and laughs while singing “For Good.”

“Sometimes that sort of messiness feels more human and grounded,” Kerstein says.

“For Good” had been the scene Chu was most nervous to film, in part because it was the titular and final song and because so many iconic duos had covered it. He first conceived of it as a kind of power moment, where Elphaba and Glinda reunite and proclaim their commitment to each other, with many discussions around the camera shots and who to cut to during the song. The scene then came up unexpectedly in the filming process, as the planned outdoor shoot that day was canceled due to rain. Once the shoot began, Chu leaned into the emotions in the room and discovered it was more of a song about sacrifice and about giving each other strength in a tragic moment.

“What I love about the edit is it feels so natural and so simple,” says Chu. “But every discussion was not simple.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.Click here to subscribe