Ethan Slater has something to confess-a about which Wicked star’s transformation took the longest: his own.
The Tony-nominated star revealed that his hair and makeup process took longer than anyone else’s across both movies — yes, even longer than Cynthia Erivo‘s greenifying to become Elphaba, and his real-life girlfriend Ariana Grande‘s transformation into bubbly Glinda.
Warning: Wicked: For Good spoilers ahead.
“Even in movie one, for some reason, I was in the chair for the longest of anyone,” Slater revealed on the Today show on Friday. He then joked, “I’m very particular,” before explaining seriously that he had to wear “a lot of hair extensions” to become lovestruck munchkin Boq.
“It was my hair but they wanted to make it thicker, fuller, a little brighter, and [add] freckles and all this stuff,” Slater said.
Ethan Slater as the Tin Man in ‘Wicked: For Good’.
Universal Pictures
But it wasn’t just his hair. In Wicked: For Good, Boq is forcibly turned into the Tin Man by Elphaba after Nessarose (Marissa Bode) miscasts a spell on him from the Grimmerie. Becoming metallic only further added time in the hair and makeup trailer for Slater during filming.
Frances Hannon, the head of the hair and makeup department, tells Entertainment Weekly that the process of turning Slater into the Tin Man took about four hours every day. And the star praised hair and makeup artist Zoey Stones for being “amazing” throughout that entire time, adding that he “tried everything to make it easier.”
“But no, there were days in the second movie where I was in the chair for five hours,” he said. “Which sounds bad, but there was plenty to do [while in the chair].”
It wasn’t just his hair and makeup transformation that made Slater’s time in Oz complicated. The star previously revealed that he had “the tiniest bit” of overlap between his schedules for the two Wicked movie musicals and his villainous role as the body-snatching founder of Godolkin University in season 2 of Gen V.
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Slater told EW last month that he wrapped filming the season 2 finale at 3 a.m. in the morning on Oct. 31, 2024, then went to the Toronto airport so he could start the Wicked press tour later that same day in Seattle. Slater called it “one of the craziest transitions of my life.”
“He’s an elevated villain who is smarter than anyone else in the room,” Slater said. “So incredible and dark and twisted and weird.”
Wicked: For Good is now playing in theaters.