The Wicked movie has its leads!

 Recently, the Wicked musical was criticized for never having cast Elphaba with a woman of color. The actress playing the character has to wear green makeup covering her face and hands throughout the musical, so her physical appearance is already altered.

The Wicked movie, after years of development, finally made some announcements after hiring In The Heights and Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chu: they're filming in London and they've cast their leads.

Singer and actress Ariana Grande will be playing Galinda/Glinda and actress Cynthia Erivo will play Elphaba.

 That's right, Elphaba will be played by a woman of color.

I'm not going to claim to be too familiar with the work of either. I've never been in much of Ariana's target demographic. I did see Hairspray Live! in which she played Penny, and I've blogged about Mika's "Popular Song" where she sings with him and appears in the radio/music video version which uses "Popular" from Wicked as a basis.

Cynthia Erivo starred in Harriet, the Harriet Tubman biopic from a couple years ago. Last year, she voiced Madame Moonshine, "the witchy little owl" in a Hank the Cowdog podcast, singing the song "Disorientation" alongside Matthew McConaughey. She also took part in Wicked in Concert on PBS.

There's a seven year age difference between the two, however, this is a movie, there's various makeup and digital tricks to make the actresses look younger or older as needed, and one of them is going to be made to have green skin throughout.

We're now awaiting the rest of the cast, such as who'll play the Wizard (Tara and EmKay of Down the Yellow Brick Pod have been putting forward Andre DeShields), Madame Morrible, Boq, Fiyero, Nessarose and other cast members.

Anyway, this is definitely good news for the movie as we'd had no confirmed cast members before, which didn't suggest a lot of activity on the project. If the production doesn't meet with any more issues, we should be getting it in the next few years. 2022 might be too soon, 2023 looks good, though they'll likely aim for a holiday release, so we should expect to wait two years. (It was previously slated for December 2019, before being taken off the release schedule and the date given to the film adaptation of Cats.)