EXCLUSIVE: “Unlimited”, Cynthia Erivo sings, “My future is unlimited.” The lyrics  from The Wizard and I, a number from the musical Wicked, tumble sweetly, melodically – effortlessly – from her mouth. Such a moment could not have happened 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, because, the star reveals: “I was not ready.”

Erivo, 37, says that she first had to understand life in order to play Elphaba, the young woman with green pigmentation in a world of Caucasians, whose story she recounts breathtakingly in Universal’s movie musical extravaganza Wicked.

Directed by Jon M. Chu, the film is based on Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the long running Broadway show it’s adapted from, with a book by Winnie Holzman and music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. It details the friendship that developed between Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, played with aplomb by Ariana Grande, when they were students.

The film also stars Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Bowen Yang, Bronwyn James and Andy Nyman.

“Elphaba doesn’t exist if you don’t have the experience of what that all feels like,” Erivo says when we meet in London. “You can’t understand the kind of pain that she’s going through if you don’t actually go through that kind of pain. You can’t understand what it feels like to be in a room and feel you don’t belong. Actually don’t belong.”

“The people don’t want you there. And that’s happened here,” she says firmly. That’s here, in London.

“Painful moments”

Cynthia and I are not strangers. It was probably 13 years ago that she told me that her father had disowned her. “He rejected me,” she states.

Aged 16, Erivo and her younger sister Stephanie were with her father one morning on the platform of an underground station in South London. He was off, he didn’t want to see them again. Until, that is, they met per chance 10 years later at a family wedding. They haven’t spoken since.

The two siblings were raised by their mother, Edith (Erivo’s production company is named Edith’s Daughter), who worked as a nurse.

“That was one of those painful moments,” she says.

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), from which she graduated in 2010, was a place where, she tells me, ”I definitely didn’t feel necessarily completely welcome.”

Her time there would have become unbearable had it not been for Nona Shepphard, one of RADAs associate directors who took her on the road in Ophelia, Dee Cannon, one of her acting teachers, and Philip Raymond, her singing teacher. “Thank goodness they were there,” she says.

During her time at RADA, Erivo played Jenny, who sang the operatic aria in the song Getting Married Today from the  Stephen Sondheim musical, Company. There were juicier parts, but they weren’t offered to her. Monumental change the occurred back in February, when longtime RADA president Kenneth Branagh was succeeded by David Harewood as president and Erivo took on the role of vice president.

I heard Cynthia Erivo long before I saw her. A friend passed me a bootleg recording of the Company concert and suggested that I fast forward to hear the “girl” with the voice. I saw her in  several concerts she put on to showcase her outsize talent and I watched her pop up here and there in everything from Sister Act to The Color Purple to Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of Henry IV at the Donmar Warehouse.

The Color Purple, directed by John Doyle  at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2013, was her breakthrough. In time it transferred to Broadway and Erivo won the Tony Award for Best Actress In A Musical.

Upon her return, golden Tony trophy in tow, she waited for offers.

The Royal National Theatre, symbol of Britain’s theatrical excellence, offered her the part of the Blue Fairy in a try-out musical production of Pinocchio, which Dennis Kelly adapted from Carlo Collodi’s tale and Disney’s 1940 classic. “Two sheets,”  she exclaims. 

“I had just won the Tony on the New York stage playing Celie and they gave me two sheets to perform,” which was barely a role. “I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” she says.

Rejection comes with the territory of being an actor, she understands that. But you couldn’t blow your nose on the two pieces of paper the National deemed her worthy of.

She returned to the U.S. where she was encouraged to pursue what wasn’t available to her in the UK – a chance to aim for roles worthy of her talent.

The pain Elphaba feels in Wicked doesn’t “come through her eyes if you don’t actually know what it feels like,” she adds.

“We learn from it. It’s all information that if we’re willing … you have to be sure enough of yourself and brave enough to relive some of those things to let them come through. And that is painful enough as it is,” Erivo says.

And, yes, she has come across people who don’t believe she doesn’t deserve success and that she should be grateful for whatever she has achieved. ”In the past  I’ve definitely had that,” she allows. 

“And all that has done is make me more determined to create a life for myself that I want and I believe I deserve,” she adds.

“But I also know the hard work that’s gone into it. I know the time  and the effort and the strain and the tenacity and the hours and the sleepless nights  and the exhaustion that’s gone into getting to this place,” which included early film roles in Steve McQueen’s Widows and Drew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale.

Something takes hold

Erivo scooped a Tony, Grammy and Emmy Award for The Color Purple; Best Actress Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Kasi Lemmons’ movie Harriet, and Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for achievement in writing the song “Stand Up.”

On Monday she received a Golden Globe nomination for her Elphaba in Chu’s wizard musical, as she continues her path to awards darling status.

Something takes hold when you watch her in Wicked again and again and again. Each time I seem to like it more than the previous time. I notice little bits of magic. The mellifluous voice with its deep, soothing warmth, is like a drink of  freshly squeezed lemons laced with honey [and a splash of hot water]. It’s difficult for her to describe what her own voice sounds like. ”I might hear it differently to how you hear it,” she explains.

But she knows that, practically, her voice has a treble in it and depending on the song, the bottom will drop, which is why some people think she’s a mezzo soprano or an alto. In fact it’s D sharp and there are four octaves.

But there’s something else going on as well. “I can yodel,” she laughs. The yodel, along with everything else, allows her instrument to lure you.

“I’ve always been curious about the expansiveness of a voice,” she says, noting how the range and texture can can convey the emotion in a story.

“So whether it’s a yodel or a wail or a soothe or a cry, those are the things I try to use,” she says.

The result is an array of color. And as she ascends in the “Defying Gravity” scene there’s a growl, a roar, that gives her lift off.

But the real test, for me anyway, comes in “The Wizard,” where she asks: ”Did that really just happen?”

She sings it for me. There’s a hint of a laugh, of merriment, that coincides with “happen.” 

In the song “I’m Not That Girl” with its plaintive melody, there’s an ache that wounds your heart, that brings about a cry in the middle of a note, that I hadn’t heard in the Broadway and West End stage productions. 

There’s a “sort of immediate process that happens within my brain and my voice to provide that,” she explains.

“It’s weird,” she reflects “because now it’s just second nature. I think if you had asked me 15 years ago, I would still have been learning where to play certain things and what to do with it and how to make a certain sound. And now it’s second nature through practice. It just happens,” she shrugs as she sips her specially prepared green tea brew.

“It’s like there’s a catalog of different textures that make me feel a certain way. That cry allows me to feel really open. And the growl is connected to the gut, so it feels guttural. And then the laugh feels lighter and that’s where you want it, you want light in certain places,” she shares in what is starting to be my very own masterclass.

How does she protect the tiny muscles that produce the honey and lemon qualities? 

“Practically? Hydration,” she responds.

“Rest when you can get it. Quiet. And tea. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke,” and she doesn’t consume dairy, which usually creates mucus in the voice.

“And also metaphysically, I don’t let it go to waste,” she says. “I use it the way it’s meant to be used.” She adds that those concerts she put on in London back in the day gave her the confidence to perform in venues with symphony orchestras from the Royal Albert Hall to the Rose Bowl. 

‘Purple Haze’

The team that Chu and producer Marc Platt assembled has ensured that Erivo’s voice comes right at you through the screen, as does Grande’s.

That’s down to Simon ‘Purple Haze’ Hayes, the movie’s Academy Award-winning production sound mixer. 

Hayes won his Oscar for the techniques he introduced for the live sung numbers in Les Miserables produced by Cameron Mackintosh, Working Title, and  -again- Universal. His other work on movie musicals includes Mamma Mia!, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and, of course, Wicked: Part Two.

Erivo’s a huge fan. “I think he has a deep understanding of what the voice can actually do. And his raison d’être is to provide the space for the voice to exist in. And that’s what he does,” she marvels as she tells how, to enable the company to sing live on set, Hayes and his crew would place a mic in whichever corner, so that if Elphaba looks in that direction, it will catch the sound.

She explains: “He goes, ‘I’m going to put a mic in her hat, or I’m going to put them just so on her lapel with this muffler so it doesn’t get distorted. I want to catch every sound that comes out of her mouth. I want to catch every breath that leaves her.’”

Then Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks makes sure that her eyes are captured “so that you hear the voice and you see my eyes. So I’m telling the truth because it’s in my eyes and you can hear it in my voice. Both things are getting captured at the same time,” she adds.

Once you’ve experienced the ‘Purple Haze,’ you want more. “It’s the first time I’ve worked with him. I hope to work with him countless other times,” she declares.

I first observed Hayes on the set of Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels where everyone was having a larf, but he was having none of it. He was fastidious. On eight other movie sets he’s worked on, I’ve always ensured that I have a natter with Hayes.

“No person talking or whispering when a person is singing. No one breaks that rule. No one, so that he sets the tone immediately,” she says nodding enthusiastically when I dub him the Wizard of Sound.

Erivo says that it was the combination of Hayes, Chu, Brooks and first camera operator Karsten Jacobson that located the “truth” of her performance.

She also worked closely with  Schwartz because, initially, they made a recorded version of the songs for rehearsals on set “before we could record it live” and, importantly, he gave her space to put her stamp on his songs for the film. She smiles and she remembers “he was like, actually, ‘I really trust you as a storyteller Cynthia, so whatever you need to do to tell the story, do it’.”

Her closest collaboration, however, was with Grande. The chemistry between the pair is electric.

“You can’t get that if you don’t have it off[screen]. I mean, well done if you can, but there’s something that feels very tangible when you create that off screen,” she reasons.

“We are friends,” she says warmly. “We are in a deeply honest relationship outside of the work. I talk to her almost every day. She messages me every day and we are always in conversation…if there’s something that I want her ears on or I want her opinion on, I send it to her. If there’s something she wants my opinion on, she sends it to me. We are always trying to be aligned.”

Leaning forward, she adds: “Because if the seeking of alignment and finding each other in the same space means that our voices work together like that, it means that when I’m in the scene for “Popular” it is funny and I can be alive because I’m there to provide that.”

Similarly, when Erivo’s performing “Defying Gravity”, “she can also be alive to provide audience and to connect so that when you are watching those things, you realize, ‘oh my god, there are others in the scene, but that’s person isn’t taking the energy out of the scene, and that’s actually feeding the scene more.”

It’s because, she insists, “because neither one of us is wanting to be selfish. We’re always like, ‘what’s the ground you need?’, ‘what feeling do you need?’ We are looking in each other’s eyes to see, ‘what does she need?’”

Wicked has sort of given audiences permission to have conversations about race, gender or even totalitarianism.

Erivos says Grande speaks about people having conversations, “about being brave enough to change your mind because people sometimes get very afraid to be wrong.”

Erivo has spent her life learning the gifts, learning the skills “that I’ve had to be ready for whatever comes.”

However, she’s not sure “if young Cynthia knew that it would be possible” to see herself on a huge screen as the star of a beloved musical.

I ask her if the tale I’ve heard from some folk in New York, that she and Grande will take over the lead roles in the Broadway production of Wicked for a limited season next year, is true.

She shakes her head. “That’s not going to happen. Neither one of us has time. We have anther film [Wicked: Part Two] to put out. And also there are other ladies who need the chance. We’ve had our chance. I’ve had my chance, and I’m very grateful for it. Doing that would feel a little bit selfish. I understand where the idea comes from, but we’ve done it. We had this [the film].”

The future is truly unlimited for Erivo.

She teases that “we have an inkling of what we’re doing next. I can’t say because we can’t tell anyone. There are some really cool things and I’m having some really lovely meetings with people. And I’m very excited.I have choice, which is nice.”

The choices are “cool” she adds, “because none of them are the same.”

What’s extra “cool” is that she’s being shown “everything” she says giddily, revealing “that the role might have been imagined for a man, and they go, ‘well, could she…?’”

Neither gender nor race is a barrier anymore. “They go, ‘actually, Cynthia could do it.’ She could.”

She clasps her hands together, her signature nails criss-crossing. “The world sort of expanded. The world got really big and it’s been fun to watch. But there’s definitely a feeling of: ’How do I navigate this world properly? And I want to do it either way gracefully, and I want to make sure that I don’t take it for granted. And that also I keep expanding it, that it doesn’t just end here. There’s more to do.”

The physical embodiment of that is also in The Wizard and I. She steps across a lake and keeps ascending, singing as she moves. Elphaba is in motion all the way to the White Cliffs of Dover knowing that she needs to learn how to fly.

I confess that there have been occasions over the years when I have had to check my anger when I’ve seen her belittled. But she’s proved indomitable, at least on the surface.

Now, Cynthia Erivo is ready  to soar, defying gravity.

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