Is the world of the Wizard of Oz cursed? Or is Hollywood just a monster toward its women? Either way, it’s quite the coincidence that the female leads of both the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” and 2024’s “Wicked” experienced drastic physical transformations while filming their movies.
So, what really happened on the “Wicked” set?
For context, “Wicked” is a 2003 Broadway musical based on the 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West”. The novel is loosely based on “The Wizard of Oz”, but has no canonical ties to the film or novel. The musical grew a mountainous fandom in the last 20 years and earned a film adaptation beginning in Dec. of 2022 and releasing in Nov. of 2024. The film stars Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba ( the Wicked Witch of the West).
Grande’s physical appearance has been a largely discussed topic in pop culture since the early 2010s. She was ridiculed for her size as a teenager and as a young adult. People often discredited her ability and worthiness due to her thinness. She’s gone through many different phases of her life where she has tried on different fashion, makeup, and hairstyles, while also being the beholder of several differing bodily compositions. Grande has always been thin, but since filming began two years ago, she’s grown concerningly small.
Erivo began as a Broadway powerhouse, most notable for her performance in the 2019 historical musical “Harriet”. She is known for her strong, supportive vocal performances and her distinct short hair. In Erivo’s successful past on Broadway and as a musical performer, she has had a strong, healthy body; one that looks like your everyday early-30s woman. However, she has undergone the same extreme weight loss that her “Wicked” counterpart did.
Fans have grown genuinely concerned for the womens’ health and safety, finding them to look quite eerie in their recent interviews and press tours. It’s become an internet joke that the two are always crying in their interviews and conceived a larger-than-life bond behind the scenes, but some watchers are beginning to think something else may be going on here; an extremely competitive eating disorder relationship.
Eating disorders are defined as a range of mental conditions in which there is a persistent disturbance of eating behavior and an impairment of physical or mental health. A psychological component of these illnesses is the competition factor. Those who suffer from intense eating disorders often rely on their peers as motivation and create a race in their heads to discern who could lose weight the fastest or be the smallest.
In other words, fans believe that Grande and Erivo have made themselves dueling competitors in that race.
On the other hand, some think it may just be “the curse of ‘The Wizard of Oz’”. Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the 20th-century film, was bullied by industry executives, called names like “piggy”, and forced into a diet of chicken soup, black coffee, and 80 cigarettes a day to lose weight and maintain a petite figure. Soon after, she was put on a sprawling list of drugs to lose weight and became physiologically and psychologically dependent on them. This began happening to her when she was only 17 years old, and would ultimately lead to her tragic death at 47.
Whether Grande and Erivo are truly living out the anorexic nightmares that existed on Tumblr, or they’ve become Oz’s next victims, there’s been a drastic shift back toward the toxic diet culture of the 1990s and early 2000s that makes its way back every 20 years, claiming victims from each decade it targets.
