‘Wicked’ author Gregory Maguire talked to Them about his 1995 novel Wicked, which inspired the Broadway musical and the new movie starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. The intentional lesbian subtext between Glinda and Elphaba was confirmed.
Maguire said he was inspired to write ‘Wicked’ in part by examining the evil that exists in the real world. He explained that creating a complex fictional universe also meant introducing sexuality into the story.
“I wanted to make Oz seem as real as Middle Earth,” he said. “I wanted it to have a depth of culture, a depth of history and a depth of complexity, of experience that was more analogous to the world in which we live. And that meant it had to have varieties of sexual experience.”
Fans had speculated about the story’s LGBTQ+ undertones long before Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande came to the screen. There is a scene in Maguire’s novel where Elphaba and Glinda kiss, and while it doesn’t make it into the musical, the author said it’s all part of the plot.
“That was intentional, and it was modest and restrained and refined in such a way that one could imagine that one of those two young women had felt more than the other and had not wanted to say it,” Maguire said.
“Or perhaps because a novelist can’t write every scene, perhaps when the lights were out and the novelist was out having a smoke in the back alley, the girls had sex in the bed on the way to the Emerald City. I wanted to propose this possibility, but I did not want to make a declarative statement about it,” the author added.
‘Wicked: Part One’ arrived in theaters on Nov. 22, with the second part of the film set to release in 2025.
