“Ari is very, very worried that I’m not resting enough, so she’s consistently texting. Jeff sent the most beautiful love letter. I love Jeff very, very much, and Jonathan. That everyone’s so lovely … it feels like we have a little bit of a family.”
She added: “I learn it in chunks. What you have to do is learn it with a reason. So I have to know where [the characters] are and what they’re doing and why they’re saying things, and that’s the only way I can commit it to memory. You learn it almost like a dancer.”
Erivo also described how she integrates rehearsal into her daily routine while training for the London Marathon, aiming for a time under three hours and 30 minutes.
She said: “While I’m running, I run the run lines in my head. I’m trying to make good use of every moment.”
Discussing the aftermath of each performance, she said: “There’s so much poured into it, emotionally, physically, mentally, everything is switched on. I don’t switch off at all.
“Everything is on and everything is firing all the time so that when you come off, you go, ‘Where am I? Yeah, am I again?’ And so it takes a second to just put everything back together. Yeah, it takes me a while to get to get to sleep. I don’t get sleep until like, 1am in the morning.”