Someone who photoshopped the poster to the Wicked movie to make it appear more like the one that appeared on Broadway was likely not expecting to get clapped back by one of the movie’s stars, Cynthia Erivo.
But she did, calling the edit “The wildest, most offensive thing I have seen.”
In an Instagram Story, Erivo showed the edited work, which depicts the brim of her witch hat casting a shadow over her eyes, as it appears in the Broadway poster.
“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a 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 insisted.
She continued, “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 suggested that the shadow was equally as offensive to her as a popular meme going around that was based on the poster, which has Ariana Grande‘s “good” witch Glinda whispering into the ear of Erivo’s Elphaba.
For delicacy’s sake, we won’t quote it, but the gist is Glinda asking her if the rest of her body is green, too.
“None of this is funny. None of this is cute,” Erivo said. “It degrades me. It degrades us.”
Wicked hits theaters Nov. 22.
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