Cynthia Erivo Recalls the ‘Big Moment’ When She Decided to Shave Her Hair to Play Elphaba in Wicked

Cynthia Erivo is reflecting on what it was like to shave her head for her Oscar-nominated role as Elphaba in Wicked: Part One. 

The “Defying Gravity” singer, 38, told the crowd during the Canva Create event at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on April 10 about the first time she “took the green off” and looked in the mirror at her shaved head.

“I remember feeling so open and vulnerable when there was nothing there. I saw my face in the mirror with no hair at all. I thought I’d really like that. I like how open that is, I like how much of a black canvas it is, and I like that there’s nothing but my eyes,” Erivo said, adding that she has felt more “in my body, in myself” since the big chop. 

Erivo also shared how she progressed into a shorter look leading up to her Elphaba gig.

“I used to get my hair braided in different colors,” Erivo said. “To this day there was one hair salad. I’m gonna get white and red braids. You couldn’t tell me that it wasn’t the best hairstyle I had ever done.” 

“I had a lot of hair when I was younger,” she continued. “So when I went to drama school, something happened … when we were graduating. I thought, ‘Oh, I want people to see my face,’ and at that point, I had a lot of hair, thick and long, and I thought, ‘I want to see what it’s like to have short hair.’ ” 

Erivo emphasized how she wanted people to just se her when she entered rooms: “I knew I was leaving to go to auditions and walk into these rooms, and I just wanted to turn up as myself. And I cut my hair, and I remember going to the hair justice, and she wouldn’t cut it,” she recalled.

“She was afraid I would miss the length of my hair … and then I went back two days later and I cut it all off,” she added.

Erivo has fond memories of perfecting the iconic wig Elphaba wears throughout the movie, mentioning hairstylist Sim Camps. 

“I bumped into Sim on a job called Luther, and she just had, just had a wonderful way of the being, but she is an expert,” Erivo said. “She’s just brilliant at what she does, and her eye for detail is beyond, and when I told her I wanted to have micro braids for this character, she was like ‘Hold on, wait, I know exactly what to do.’ ”

“She contacted the person who made a wig for me in a play that I did 12 years ago, because she knew what he was like, took measurements, sent it off, and he then, together, they sort of worked out how to make sure that the wig itself disappeared, and it looked like it was growing up my scalp,” she remembered. “And we turned the lace on the wig green. We died it a very light green, so that when it was on me, and I had a high grade scout, yeah, it disappeared.”

At the event, Erivo also dove into what it takes to get into her roles, and the mindset she puts herself in to to perfect her work. 

“I want to know who the character is,” she told the audience. “A lot of the times it’s nothing to do with the entire project. It’s often to do with who the person I’m being asked to play is, if I’ve met them, if I like them or not, sometimes if I don’t like them, that’s also the challenge to find empathy for the person that I might be playing because I’ve not met them before and I don’t know what they’re like and I haven’t experienced that person before.” 

“So it gives me the challenge of, well, ‘How do I approach this person? How do I have empathy and make this person real?’ … ‘How do I make other people maybe have empathy for this person, even though ordinarily you might not?’ ” she revealed. “That’s sort of how I approach the work and the characters that I play. … If I’m daunted by them then I want to discover who they are.”

“It’s the same feeling how I sing and the songs I choose,” Erivo continued, ahead of the release of her second studio album, I Forgive You, on June 6. “Is it going to make me work harder than I normally do? Is it going to make me challenge how much I can do? Is it going to make me push at the edges of the boundaries that I think I might have? And if I do think there are boundaries, can I move past them?”

When it comes to pushing the boundaries on the big screen, Erivo was quick to share that she was able to do so with her role in Wicked.

“I mean, Elphaba was one of those roles,” Erivo shared. “I really didn’t know how far I could go with her and that surprised me, because it sort of already has a bible of how to play her. And I think once I discovered that, oh, actually, maybe there’s, there’s a little more than I might be able to influence to play her with. Then it sort of, the world opened up a little bit more.”

Wicked’s sequel, Wicked: For Good, hits theaters on Nov. 21.