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.
Antonio Ferme editorAlong her journey of becoming a hit Broadway star, one of the valuable lessons that Cynthia Erivo said she learned was accepting “no” as an answer.“Sometimes no’s are the best way to protect you from the thing that you’re not supposed to be doing because it creates the space for the yes that you’re supposed to have in the first place,” Erivo said on Sunday afternoon during a storyteller conversation at the Tribeca Festival. “When the no comes, even though it stings in the beginning, sometimes you’ll know deep down it’s okay.”For Erivo, that yes was accepting the role of the green-skinned Elphaba in Jon M.
Chu’s upcoming two-part film adaptation of “Wicked.” Erivo will star alongside Ariana Grande, who will be playing Glinda the Good Witch.
While the project isn’t set to start production until later this summer, Erivo revealed that she has been video chatting with her co-star to prepare for the highly-anticipated film. “I saw her a couple of months ago, we’ve been FaceTiming and talking,” Erivo told Variety on the red carpet. “I get to speak to her a lot now.
We’re gonna be in each other’s lives for a bit.”Set before the events of “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked” tells the story of how Elphaba goes on to become the Wicked Witch of the West — the titular antagonist of the 1939 film.“The most exciting thing about bringing [Elphaba] to the screen is getting to ground her out and seeing the reasons why she is the way she is,” Erivo said. “Finding the beginning stories where we know her and just trying something different and new.
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