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If being best friends on the set of Wicked wasn’t enough, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo forged an everlasting bond on Wicked: For Good.
In an Instagram post shared on Saturday, November 1, Grande, 32, wrote that she is counting down the days until the 2024 release of her Wicked sequel and sequel, For Good.
Grande captioned the post, “Happy Wicked Month @wickedmovie♡20 days,” along with a photo of herself and Erivo (38) on set and a photo of their hands, revealing that they have matching “For Good” tattoos on their palms.
The cast and crew of Wicked have spoken candidly about how the pop star and Tony Award winner, who plays Galinda and Elphaba, respectively, developed a very close bond while starring in the Broadway musical version.
“It was one of the most beautiful friendships to watch grow,” director Jon M. Chu told PEOPLE on Oct. 28.
Chu, 46, said of Wicked’s leading ladies: “These are two of the loudest voices in the world, probably in our lifetimes. They might have hated each other.” “There may have been a crazy divaship, but they always think of Wicked as bigger than themselves. I think it’s a great sign of a great artist that they were able to immerse themselves in Elphaba and Galinda and find themselves in these characters.”
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“And I think it just makes Elphaba and Galinda larger than life and we get to know them more intimately than ever before,” he added. “I think what they bring to these characters is what makes them feel culturally relevant. It makes my job a lot easier.”
In the big screen version of Wicked, Erivo and Grande played the roles originated by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth on Broadway.
“I loved watching it all happen. I got a front row seat. I loved it,” Chu told PEOPLE. “They were family. We could have director-actor discussions, we could have brother-sister discussions, and that meant the world to me.”
At a Canva Create event in April, Erivo said singing with Grande was “really exhilarating and a little bit addictive.”
“When you work with someone who understands that, there’s a great synergy. They can look you in the eye and know exactly what you need, when you need it, without you having to say it,” she said of her co-stars.
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She noted that the “vulnerability and listening” between the two helped the song stay at the top of everyone’s playlists for months.
“When your voices become one, it means they hear you and you hear them,” Erivo said of singing with Grande. “It has nothing to do with, ‘What does my voice sound like?’ In fact, it has nothing to do with, ‘What do you do?
“Anything is possible if we both do it at the same time,” Erivo explained.
As for Grande, the “God Is a Woman” singer said last year that it felt like it was “destiny” to work with Broadway star Erivo.
“I hope we can learn a lot from each other, but I learned so much from her as a human being,” she said during an appearance on the PodCrushed Podcast in June 2024. “And she loves hard. She’s a Capricorn, and she loves hard, honest, and right.”
Regarding the personalities of each character, the singer said, “There’s something baked into the roles that are so different from each other that you never know what’s going to happen when you share this experience in a big way.”
“People have needs and their own creative processes, and we never know if we’re going to be healthy or not,” Grande continued. “And it was just the most symbiotic and beautiful (experience).”
Wicked: For Good opens in theaters on November 21st. Wicked is available to purchase and stream now.
