Cynthia Erivo is opening up about shaving her head to play Elphaba in Wicked.
While appearing at the Canva Create event on April 10 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, the 38-year-old Oscar-nominated actress recalled the first time she “took the green off” and looked in the mirror at her shaved head.
“I remember feeling so open and vulnerable when there was nothing there,” Cynthia said, via People. “I saw my face in the mirror with no hair at all. I thought I’d really like that. I like how open that is, I like how much of a black canvas it is, and I like that there’s nothing but my eyes.
Cynthia added that she has felt more “in my body, in myself” since the shaving her head.
She also shared how she progressed into a shorter ‘do before landing the role.
“I used to get my hair braided in different colors,” Cynthia explained. “To this day there was one hair salad. I’m gonna get white and red braids. You couldn’t tell me that it wasn’t the best hairstyle I had ever done.”
“I had a lot of hair when I was younger,” she continued. “So when I went to drama school, something happened…when we were graduating. I thought, ‘Oh, I want people to see my face,’ and at that point, I had a lot of hair, thick and long, and I thought, ‘I want to see what it’s like to have short hair.’”
Cynthia went on to emphasize that she wanted people to just see her when she walked in a room.
“I knew I was leaving to go to auditions and walk into these rooms, and I just wanted to turn up as myself,” Cynthia recalled. “And I cut my hair, and I remember going to the hair justice, and she wouldn’t cut it.”
“She was afraid I would miss the length of my hair…and then I went back two days later and I cut it all off,” she added.
Cynthia also talked about teaming up with hairstylist Sim Camps to perfect the Elphaba wigs.
“I bumped into Sim on a job called Luther, and she just had, just had a wonderful way of the being, but she is an expert,” the Grammy winner recalled. “She’s just brilliant at what she does, and her eye for detail is beyond, and when I told her I wanted to have micro braids for this character, she was like ‘Hold on, wait, I know exactly what to do.’”
Cynthia continued, “She contacted the person who made a wig for me in a play that I did 12 years ago, because she knew what he was like, took measurements, sent it off, and he then, together, they sort of worked out how to make sure that the wig itself disappeared, and it looked like it was growing up my scalp. And we turned the lace on the wig green. We died it a very light green, so that when it was on me, and I had a high grade scout, yeah, it disappeared.”
If you missed it, Cynthia and Ariana Grande just recently debuted the first footage of Wicked: For Good!
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