Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo (born 8 January 1987) is an English actress, singer, and songwriter.
She is known for her performance as Celie in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, for which she won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program, the latter two she shared with the rest of the cast.
Erivo ventured into films in 2018, with roles in the heist film Widows and the thriller Bad Times at the El Royale. In 2019, she portrayed abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet, for which she earned nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Cynthia Erivo Reflects On Blasting Fan-Made ‘Wicked’ Poster She Said Degraded Her: “I Probably Should Have Called My Friends”
deadline.comCynthia Erivo is reflecting on a fan-made Wicked poster she put on blast on social media, saying the edit degraded her. During the 2024 CFDA Fashion Awards, Erivo was asked about her outburst on Instagram and said she should’ve called her friends instead. “I’m passionate about it and I know the fans are passionate about it and I think for me it was just like a human moment of wanting to protect little Elphaba, and it was like a human moment,” Erivo told Entertainment Tonight. “I probably should have called my friends, but it’s fine.” On October 16, Erivo took to social media to blast a fan-created Wicked poster that paid homage to the Broadway musical poster.
The poster for the Broadway production hides Elphaba’s eyes and has her wearing red lipstick with a smirk on her face. In the poster for the film, Erivo’s eyes are visible, and she trades the red lipstick for a green one. “The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION.
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,” Erivo posted on her Instagram stories. “Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me.
And that is just deeply hurtful.” She continued, “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posting the question, ‘is your p*** green.'” None of this is funny.
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