Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande filmed a kissing scene for ‘Wicked: For Good,’ but it turned out to be a little too steamy in the end.
“There was a kissing scene between Fiyero and Glinda that was cut out. It was romantic and beautiful, but it was a little too passionate,” the film’s co-writer Dana Fox recently told Deadline.
In this epic musical, Grande’s character Galinda (later known as Glinda the Good Witch) becomes engaged to Bailey’s character Prince Fiyero, but ultimately betrays her for Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba (later known as the Wicked Witch of the West).
“Seeing that made it too hard to see him make the choice to be with Elphaba, and it made it too hard to be OK with Elphaba running away with him,” Fox continued.
“It was so real that he and Glinda actually felt something together,” Fox said, adding that Fierro “really loved” Glinda, but “loved her in a different way.”
“But the scene was so romantic that we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll never know, because if he doesn’t choose her in the end, our brains will explode. And we’ll hate Elphaba, Glinda, and Fiyero.'”
“So I think it was a good cut because it was so adorable that it was too much to handle.”
Fox said he has no regrets about the “Wicked: For Good” footage left on the editing room floor.
“I don’t think there’s anything I wish I hadn’t cut, because I feel like everything I cut, I cut for exactly the right reasons,” she said.
Representatives for Grande and Bailey did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.
Fox co-wrote the film, a sequel to last year’s Wicked, with Winnie Holtzman. This epic two-part film was directed by John. M. Chu.
Despite the on-screen dynamic between Erivo, 38, and Grande, 32, the pair have proven to be famously solid friends off-screen, with Erivo jumping in to defend Grande after adoring fans mobbed her during a red carpet premiere in Singapore earlier this month.
“Cynthia is just such a wonderful gift of humanity,” Grande said on a December 2024 episode of the variety show “Actors on Actors.”
In an interview with Elle published last November, Erivo told Elle at the time that she “gave herself a sister” in Grande and that her friends “talk to her almost every day.”
