Commenting on other people’s bodies is extremely rude. But I have found the photos and videos coming from the Wicked promotional tour so concerning that silence would be, on balance, worse. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo have become scarily thin.
This is not just genetics or bone structure or commitment to veganism. When the American singer and British actress were cast in 2022, they were already Hollywood-thin – now you can see the outlines of their skulls through their hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. We should be concerned for them, and the women and girls who are the prime audience for this movie adaptation of one of the most popular musicals to ever hit Broadway and the West End. And we should be asking serious questions about their management and the Wicked production team allowing things to get this far.
These are two immensely talented people, huge stars in their own right before they were cast in Wicked. Grande is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with two Grammy’s to her name. Erivo is within striking distance of becoming an EGOT; she has a Tony, and Emmy and a Grammy, with two Acadamy Award nominations under her belt.
How have they been pushed this far over shooting one movie?
It was bad enough when director Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman starved themselves for the movie adaptation of Les Miserables in 2012. Hathaway lived on oatmeal paste to achieve a suitably wasted look for Fantine. “I had to be obsessive about it - the idea was to look near death," she told Vogue. Jackman drank nothing for 36 hours before shooting certain scenes.
But this is a musical about witches bonding at boarding school, not peasants suffering during the French Revolution. There’s been no suggestion that Wicked director John M. Chu made any directives about his stars’ appearances. Still, you only need eyes to see that the change in Grande and Erivo has been dramatic.
Both women have hinted at what sounds like an intensely pressured schedule on set. Both caught Covid at some point during filming. When labour strikes forced production to halt, Erivo admitted she was secretly grateful. “We'd worked ourselves to the bone,” she told one interviewer. Quite literally, it would appear.
If it was Grande alone, I’d be more hesitant to break the taboo around discussing celebrity bodies in public. She has had an intensely traumatic passage to megastardom, with a terrorist attack at her Manchester concert in 2017 and the death of her former partner Mac Miller in 2019.
Grande was also a child star on the Nickelodeon channel, which has come under scrutiny since the 2024 documentary Quiet On Set revealed a toxic environment where child sex abuse was covered up. She did not participate in the documentary but has since spoken about how its “devastating” revelations have caused led her to “reprocessing my relationship” with the shows that made her famous. That is a violent amount of trauma to stack up by your 31st birthday.
Health issues should be allowed to be kept private no matter your level of fame. All the salacious commentary around the late Chad Boseman’s dramatic weight loss rang hollow when he died from colon cancer.
But Erivo appears to have also lost a dramatic amount of weight. Before filming started, she was a noted gym bunny who spoke openly about being “a fiend for potato chips” and flew the flag for getting jacked while being vegan. Now, she looks like a walking skeleton.
I am aware that I am breaking the omerta around discussing women’s bodies in the press. After journalists disgraced the profession in the Nineties and Noughties with their red circles of shame and hounding of already-thin women, feminist writers have – rightly - attempted to course correct.
But as Ozempic bulldozes its way through the body-positivity movement and heroin chic sneaks in again, we can’t let uncomfortable levels of thinness go unremarked upon. They’re selling Mattel dolls modelled on these women to children. The number of children and young people in the UK seeking treatment for an eating disorder has more than doubled between 2016 and 2023. It cannot be normalised to be this underweight.
Grande’s online fanbase love to liken her to Audrey Hepburn, a comparison her styling team have been leaning into in the run up to the Wicked premier. There’s no denying that the Forties “New Look” silhouettes look incredible on her. But Hepburn was never a realistic example of an attainable physique. The actor grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland, almost starving to death as a girl subsisting on scavenged endives and tulip bulbs. Her metabolism likely never recovered. Any implicit pressure to emulate that level of thinness today would require a literal starvation diet.
It was shocking when publications uncritically repeated Grande’s claims on TikTok last year that she’s never been healthier. “I was on a lot of antidepressants and drinking on them and eating poorly,” she claimed. As if cutting out alcohol and eating more vegetables could give you the figure of a prisoner of war camp survivor.
Stans may see this as criticism of their favourites. But really, this is an indictment of Grande and Erivo’s management, the Wicked team, and the entertainment industry as a whole. We can’t go back to celebrating celebrities being pushed to desperate levels of thinness. It’s better to risk being rude and say something than to silently co-sign the destruction of their health and wellbeing.
India Block is a writer for The Standard
