Cynthia Erivo has grown tired of explaining her friendship to strangers on the internet — and she’s saying so plainly. In a new Variety cover story published Wednesday, the actress pushed back against years of online speculation that her bond with Wicked co-star Ariana Grande was either manufactured for cameras or something far more than platonic, saying the skepticism reveals more about the public than about either woman.
“It’s very interesting, watching what people’s perception is versus what the reality actually is,” Erivo told the publication. “Lots of psychologists seated at home deciding who we were, what we were going through, what we were doing and why. I think that people didn’t really believe that we were actually friends. But that’s also because people don’t know me very well. If I’m a friend, then I’m a friend. If I’m not, then I’m not.”
The two women spent the better part of two years in each other’s orbit, shooting Jon M. Chu’s two-part film adaptation and then blanketing the globe on a promotional run that started nine months before the first film’s November 2024 release — appearing together at the Oscars, matching their red carpet wardrobes to their characters, and giving emotionally raw joint interviews that spawned dozens of viral moments. The closeness looked real because it was. Erivo said the pair still text each other almost every day.
The backlash, when it came, tracked a familiar arc — obsessive adoration curdling into mockery, with some commentators framing Erivo as a sidekick or protector rather than an equal creative force. After Erivo physically intervened when a man vaulted a barrier and grabbed Grande at the Singapore premiere — Grande has PTSD stemming from the 2017 Manchester bombing — coverage praised her reflexes but also generated memes casting her as Grande’s “bodyguard.” Erivo told Variety she believes the reaction exposed something uglier: “I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women.”
The romance speculation had a parallel life. In February, Erivo told The Stylist she had “never really spoken about” the rumors before, describing a “strange fascination” from the public that reduced their relationship to two options: performance or secret affair. Grande, for her part, told The Hollywood Reporter around the same time that people had become convinced the pair were “secretly married” and said she wished she could “unsee” some of the explicit fan-generated imagery their characters inspired.
Erivo attributed the ongoing confusion to a broader cultural failure to recognize intimate female friendship as legitimate. “There’s such little conversation around platonic female friendship that is deep and real, even though it exists everywhere,” she said. “We’re not used to seeing it on camera, in front of people.” The friendship, she has written, began with a deliberate pact — both women deciding early in production to build each other up and protect the relationship they were making.
