Inside the making of Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba in ‘Wicked’: ‘We were never going for a witchy look’

nypost.com:

makeup artist and hairstylist Frances Hannon.Hannon told The Post her work on Erivo, 37, and the rest of the cast started with researching the world of Oz.“I looked into everything.

Every book. I’ve seen ‘Wicked’ many times. I went and refreshed myself. The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ as well,” Hannon said. “But we were never going for a witchy look,” she added about the making of Erivo’s character. “We were making it very real, very timeless and very connected to everybody.

We weren’t going for the prosthetic fantasy version at all. Jon [M. Chu] always wanted everything real.”Hannon conceived her idea for Elphaba’s hair for the film even before Erivo arrived in the United Kingdom for filming in 2022.“She loved the micro braiding, which gave her lots of scope for her to have freedom with her hair,” she explained. “But we always kept in mind that it’s very important to never get so big because with the black hat and the huge black cloak, she could have disappeared.

Her hair wasn’t black, it was brown mixed, but she could have disappeared completely within that.”As for the makeup process on Erivo, Hannon explained how she created the color of Elphaba’s infamous look.“I started by trying to find the right shade of green for the skin tone because one would never use anything that was used onstage because that was face-painted and played for the back of the audience, whereas we wanted it to work in every light, but certainly in big close-ups,” she said.