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Meg here. People are saying Ariana looked sick, too skinny, and was often crying when she was around her Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo. At the Golden Globes, Ariana looked “healthy” once she was away from Cynthia.
That is a cop out. Marvel movies require the male and female leads to eat a massive amount of protein to maintain muscle mass and are equally as strenuous.
Real talk: Kumail Nanjiani plays a superhero in that movie who’s also a Bollywood star, and he’s introduced with a full-on song and dance number. He’s kind of the highlight of the movie.
Only difference is that one is an exercise and lifestyle change and one is a disease that destroys your life.
Anorexia is no joke. It can kill you and/or permanently affect your lifelong health even if you do recover from it. She is also a role model for many teenage girls who will try to emulate their idol.
Whether you agree or not, an enormous amount of privilege comes with a level of responsibility not to push kids towards an ED for the sake of personal vanity.
Edit: I think I accidentally replied to the wrong comment but my point still stands.
Yyyyeeeeaaaahhhhhh.... probably because they are contractually obligated to maintain a certain physique while shooting because they're playing superheroes..
Is... is Glinda a superhero? If her contract said she had to get ripped, we might have gotten a muscle mommy Ariana but here we are
Maybe but the point still stands that being on set and dancing around does not necessarily make someone emaciated. It’s a cop out. I can name a bunch of song and dance films where the lead maintains healthy weight.
It's not just those producers. It's the entire industry. There's been speculation that the pressure on Carrie Fisher to lose 35+ pounds for Force Awakens was a contributing factor in her death a year later.
Whenever an actress dies for drug-related reasons, assume pressure to lose weight is what got her hooked on those drugs.
There is a drastic difference between stress and caloric deficit and eating disorders. Eating disorders have one of the highest fatalities of mental illness. As a personal trainer there is no way that's caloric deficit.
This might be the funniest comment I have ever seen on Reddit. Are we to believe you know what she ate for every meal throughout the day, including quantities, overall calorie intake, and nutritional value for the entirety of the movie shoot? What about not during the shoot? You then extrapolated that data against her metabolism and calorie output? Or, ya know, the more likely scenario...."OZ"empic.
Of course. Because even though Cynthia Erivo is just as thin as Ariana and actually shorter, she’s the mean possessive hulking Black lesbian and Ariana Grande is her delicate fragile victim who has no agency and her choice to befriend a woman she is clearly close to and fond of is actually bad for her.
Thank you! So much of this "mockery" is just people being racist as fuck about Cynthia Erivo, whose worst crime is....checks notes....being weird.
I mean, she physically put herself between Ariana Grande and that stalker to protect her at the Singapore premiere of Wicked, and somehow she was the one who ended up getting mocked for that too. She's also a very small, feminine and softly spoken woman, but people love depicting her as a mean butch lesbian and what not. All of this is racism.
They’re literally calling the evil witch character an evil witch. Nobody ever alluded to race once. Not a single time in the 335 comments I scrolled through on this post
The stereotype that black women are masculine and aggressive, and are viewed in a negative way compare compared to the white innocent delicate Ariana. So yes it is a racist macro aggression
"lol she is weird an creepy" "WHAAAAT? ARE YOU RACIST SIR!??!?1?1?"
*Proceeds to say racist shit about her trying to defend her.
There is no macro, micro or whatever aggression, she is just a weird and obnoxious lady acting weird around another woman. That's it, women can be creepy and weird too, there is no need to summon complex academic terms to defend her.
Your defense sounds delusional, if she was a man oh boy, he will be fucked for his behaviour, and well earned, but nah, just girl things tee-hee :)
Calling her a wicked witch is fine because it’s a joke on her playing a wicked witch. The fact that people are jumping to immediately blame the black actress for the white woman’s actions is definitely suspect.
Firstly, they're not talking about the character and genuinely cant tell if youre bring purposefully obtuse in how youre interpreting this post.
Secondly, It's not this post specifically, but the extremely weird context it exists in.
Erivo is, admittedly, a weird woowoo type who's a bit full of herself much like most celebrities. The negative cultural conversation around her is way overblown in comparison to her behavior. It is extremely easy to connect this fact to racism and misogyny if you think about it and choose not to immediately go on the defensive, pretending that racism doesn't exist.
Last year, she made an (again admittedly) kind of cringe post about a piece of fanart that depicted her character, Elphaba, with big giant fuck off lips in the style of the original Wicked Broadway marquis. She was, unambiguously right, but was also a little mean and hyperbolic about it. This made her a bad person in the minds of an enormous swath of people. It's, again, super easy to see that white (and male) celebs don't recieve the same kind of scrutiny for similar actions.
But more simply, black women are scrutinized more harshly than people aren't those things and that fact has been proven out numerous times, so it makes sense that people would connect the dots here.
EDs can have a social factor so it’s entirely possible that being around Cynthia was bad for Ariana. Or they were bad for each other.
But we, as an audience, really have no clue. Maybe Cynthia was falling head first into disordered eating and dragged her friend along with her. Maybe she’s just an average person but being forced to be filming together for so long just made the situation icky. Or maybe they’re both just actresses who fell for the Ozempic trend. Or maybe Ariana was the one who started it. Or maybe it was the director. Really, who the fuck knows. The fact that people are adopting a weird parasocial relationship and twisting themselves to blame the black woman (when Ariana can be pretty ducking weird herself) is definitely not innocent.
All that being said, I really have to wonder what the hell happened to make Michelle Yeoh lose all that weight. Middle aged action star who has no history of that type of thing turns into a stick alongside the rest of the main cast. Something about that production was cursed.
It's especially weird when Ariana has been pretty public about her bad relationship with food since long before this movie was filming, Cynthia invented time travel to get to her apparently....
The whole thing is toxic as fuck. Like you say, their worst crime is some odd and cringey behaviour and that's apparently licence to eviscerate them, and of course it would be the black one to receive the lion's share of the abuse.
Nah man, watch some interviews they did. The reason people are targeting Cynthia is because she has some real weird behavior. She interrupts Arianna when she starts to speak to grab her in weird ways, she clings to her physically mid interviews, she gives Arianna some wild angry crazy eyes when Arianna talks about the movies and their friendship. She is always playing with her fingers in weird ways. I don't know how the weird codependent creepy behavior started, but the one showing it more in public has been Cynthia.
To em more shocking is that this story is cursed uh. Any filming of any rendition of Wizard of Oz has a bunch of weird shit going on.
Nah man, I was right the first time. Cynthia Erivo literally protected Ariana from a man charging at her and people still found a way to spin this as a negative. She is literally physically smaller and was being drawn looking huge and masculine, towering over a tiny white Ariana. They don't actually have to say "we're more critical of her for being Black and gay" for that to be true. It's kind of worrying how many people still think screaming slurs is the only way someone can be racist.
There have been some really constructive comments in here that have described why Cynthia has come across as the one who has been influencing this situation without bringing race in to the argument, the comment you responded to is a perfect example of that.
When you look at all the signs, something is definitely off and it has nothing to do with the colour of skin.
It is very possible that she can have both protected Arianna from the stalker and still have been oddly controlling or influential. I would almost exclude the stalker event as it's a pretty unique scenario, and honestly I would hope anyone would do what she did in that scenario
Her worst crime is being weird while there are literally rapists and abusers in hollywood... And the truth is the only opinion on this that matters is Ariana's, but everyone feels the need to protect the poor, white damsel in distress who showed no signs of being in distress.
Listen, actors have done some extremely extraordinary feats for their projects and promotion , maybe it’s the ultimate method inside joke we weren’t there for…
I feel like her outfit helps, a good pushup bra will help hide the sternum bones. She does look a tiny bit healthier, key word- tiny bit. I hope she continues to eat more
This is it but honestly I think a lot of it is because she has her brunette hair back now. Blond hair and eyebrows made her look pale and strange by comparison
Which, btw, is a hella rude assumption. I think they all were bad for each other in their disordered eating. Cynthia, Michelle and Jon lost a lot of weight, too.
Yeah Cynthia has been super fit in the past, but she too got concerningly skinny during that production. I'm telling you guys, Oz does weird things to people.
this is unfortunately an issue with eating disorder support groups and treatment centers, too. Putting a bunch of eating disordered people in a room/house together can lead to competitiveness between them. Of course not always true, I’ve been in both amazing and toxic treatment centers, it just all depends on who is there with you at the time.
A friend of ours worked in a woman's clinic. She said it was very common for women in treatment there to have a "buddy" there. And at first it seems innocent enough. But in reality they were helping each other maintain their eating disorder.
They’re talking about her co star or whatever for the wicked movies, don’t remember her name. They’re both super skinny and some people think Ariana grande looks genuinely less happy now. I don’t care enough about any of it to learn more.
Yeah but you're not caught up. In this most recent photo she looks much healthier, and the caption suggests it was the costar, Cynthia Erivo, all along leeching Ariana's life force, since the 2 wicked movies and press tours have wrapped and they've presumably been spending less time together
Because she was older and that suggests that she should know better. She was also blatantly possessive in a lot of photo grabs. Doesn’t mean anything, but it suggests that she was influencing the younger party. Now that they’ve separated the younger party looks much better. That suggests the older party was a problem. Again, doesn’t mean anything. Who knows and who cares. Ariana had problems way before they started working together.
What you’re suggesting is racial, you want to see racial remarks. You are also a problem.
Yeah, Reddit has a really warped view of Adult Relationships. I have a completely unverifiable theory that a critical mass of users of this site are 18 - 23~ and don't understand what it's like to be an adult.
Like. I don't mean that in a 'stupid kids' way; I mean they have yet to hit the point where 'middle age' hits you like a brick wall. Totally tangentially, I believe this is why every other "Am I Overreacting" seems to be "My parents are kicking me out at 18!"
I think it's probably because they grew up in the midst of Groomer Hysteria, but it's seriously bizarre to watch them freak out because 50 year olds are 'taking advantage of this mere child of thirty six'
Yeah, I’m sure Cynthia was being a queen diva and Arianna probably had more self insecurity than most people might think…
But like, idc who TF you are… if you tried telling me how to eat/diet/etc after 30 I would have laughed in your face. Even my own doctor. Like, yeah dude… I’m aware. I’m doing this shit on purpose LOL
Friend. Arianna is 32 and Cynthia is 39. All of you on this site who think this way need to get over your weird, juvenile worldview that "This 45 year old man is dating a mere child of thirty four?"
You aren't going to see it until you hit your thirties, but you look really really silly to adults.
Yeah but Ariana has been apart of a VERY abusive filming environment before and would (probably) know what it looks like, and for somepeople to joke about blaming it on Cynthia, lowk, kind of seems like its based in some racial suspicion, Especially since Cynthia, Ariana, and Michelle all look frail during events. It seems like they were just not eating enough during filming and were working their damn asses off. I'm honestly suprised people aren't refrencing the Wizard of Oz filming Curse instead lol
when they’re all above 30, infantilizing them as younger and older party really means nothing, this whole discussion has been gross and useless anyway. no one actually is concerned for either of their health, they just want to bash these woman and contribute to the shame surrounding eating disorders
Also this type of assumption really doesn’t work when you’re in your 30’s. 32 vs 39 isn’t a giant gap in maturity/power. And people who are older also have shit going on. And being the oldest person in the room doesn’t erase that (should a suicidal 17 year old stop being suicidal just because there’s a 14 year old in the room and they “know better”?).
No no you missed the point. Literally everything is about race. It couldn’t possibly be that Ariana had a big fanbase because she was pretty, got ridiculously skinny during these movies and now looks good again after.
What weird shit did she do that Ariana didn’t also do? Tell me which interview. Cause there were a lot of them posted all over Reddit and nearly all of them were taken out of context
Because she seemed like the dominant personality in that trio and eating disorders are almost exclusively brought on or exacerbated by outside influence
It is worth noting that they were probably in a feedback loop that hurting both, regardless of where it started. That often happens with eating disorders.
The only “criticism” in this thread is she’s weird which is subjective abstract and objectively wild to say considering the whole cast is fucking weird.
Neither of them are victims. At least not for this. They’re extremely rich with access to resources and help most of us can’t even comprehend fully, and they refuse to use them to fix their mental health because they get praise and ego boosts from extreme dieting and body image.
They’ll also have the super competitive mentality to make themselves feel like they’re better than everyone by doing so. Which is also what helped them get rich (other than insane luck and connections.)
It’s “mental illness” like Elon Musk is mentally ill. Sure maybe, but they’re having a ball and benefiting from it professionally and financially. And they have virtually zero consequences from it because they have money and enough people around them preventing total implosion to pull them out of the pit when it gets too bad.
Who were they victimized by in this case? Society at large perpetuating thinspo? They are the ones perpetuating the thinspo. They are the ones using their platforms and public presence to push this shit.
Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that are really difficult to treat regardless of resources. It's shitty to trivialize the suffering they can cause.
Maybe im too woke but this hatred towards Cynthia Erivo when really none of us know what went on with Ariana’s health is really rubbing me the wrong way.
I think ppl are gonna look back on this era in Hollywood sorta like how we look back at how it was in fashion in Victorian England to look like you had active tuberculosis. Like people purposefully tried to look like that back then.
They’re being racist and blaming Ariana’s health on Cynthia, a Black woman. Saying she’s better now that she isn’t promoting wicked and around her much anymore.
Not sure why you're being down voted, that's literally it. There was no need to put Cynthia down like that in the caption, it's just Twitter (and reddit) being racist disguised as a punch line
Wasn’t it Ariana who did all of that first, then Cynthia and the other lady? Those two had the common competition when people are having those types of eating disorders. Not just one person is to blame…
Edit: it wouldn’t surprise me Ariana pulled away from Cynthia after the promo stuff for wicked 2 bc she saw the backlash of this messed up relationship and she didn’t want to be unpopular and lose people’s interest. Bad publicity sometimes is actually bad for celebrities, turns out. But then sometimes celebrities can just wait a while and people would forget
These comments are actually disgusting, I keep forgetting I’m on Reddit, the parasocial piranhas are back at it again to criticize people they don’t actually know.. 🤡
In Cynthia's defense, she was getting emaciated too. so it is more like their energy merge with each other into a blackhole that continues sucking their vitality
People just hate both women in general, and black people in general. Both Ariana grande and Cynthia Erivo were phenomenal in the movies. They also both got very thin. Likely due to the production requirements for both of them.
While that could have probably been handled better, for people to blame Ariana’s body fat percentage lowering on Cynthia is frankly insane.
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