{"id":608483,"date":"2026-05-28T12:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T12:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/608483\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T12:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T12:54:08","slug":"i-felt-my-humanity-was-bastardised-cynthia-erivo-says-reaction-to-ariana-grande-red-carpet-incident-rooted-in-racism-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/608483\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I felt my humanity was bastardised\u2019: Cynthia Erivo says reaction to Ariana Grande red carpet incident rooted in racism | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wicked star Cynthia Erivo has said that reactions to the incident at the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good, in which she stepped in to fend off a red-carpet invader<\/a> who grabbed co-star Ariana Grande, revealed \u201cthe insidious nature of how we view Black women\u201d and put her off campaigning for Oscars.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Variety<\/a>, Erivo said that she and Grande were \u201cterrified\u201d when Johnson Wen jumped a barrier at Universal Studios Singapore and rushed towards them. \u201cNobody moved. Nobody moved. So I moved because my brain went, \u2018Get him away! Get him out of here!\u2019 \u2026 And what people couldn\u2019t see is that he wouldn\u2019t let go [of Grande]. He wouldn\u2019t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erivo added: \u201cA stranger is a stranger. Personal space is still personal space. It doesn\u2019t belong to anyone, even if you feel you know the person,\u201d she says. \u201cIn that moment, we were all terrified.\u201d Wen, who has a history of disrupting public events, was sentenced to nine days in jail.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The incident triggered a huge response on social media, including suggestions that Erivo was Grande\u2019s \u201cbodyguard\u201d \u2013 something to which Erivo objects. \u201cI think that we haven\u2019t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women. And I\u2019m sure people will read this and think, \u2018Oh, for goodness sake, it\u2019s not about that.\u2019 But it is. Because that\u2019s what was being made fun of. It was my physique; it was my shape; it was the fact that I was bald; it was about what I looked like. And because of that, there was this assumption that I was bigger than my co-star and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role. I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first Wicked<\/a> film took $765m (\u00a3571m) in box office receipts worldwide on its release in 2024 and won two Oscars; the sequel has performed markedly worse, taking $541m (\u00a3404m), and received no Oscar nominations.<\/p>\n

Saying \u201cI just felt like my humanity had been bastardised,\u201d Erivo said she had been reluctant to campaign for Oscars for Wicked: For Good<\/a> as a result of reactions to the red-carpet incident. \u201cIt felt like something I did instinctively had been made to be something that it simply was not because of the way people see women who look like me, and because of the assumptions that are made, and I just didn\u2019t want to be a part of that, really and truly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want to put myself through it. I didn\u2019t feel like I deserved it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wicked star Cynthia Erivo has said that reactions to the incident at the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-608483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}