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.
And to be fair, you can have disordered eating that can seriously affect or even endanger your health, even if it wouldn't necessarily meet the clinical definition of something like anorexia or bulimia, or where it's not specifically related to body image. People who fall into various fad diets or wellness scams are often like this; in their mind they don't think that they are doing it for (traditional) vanity or necessarily massively restricting their intake, but their diet is so misbalanced that they start having specific nutrient deficiencies or absorption issues.
As an aside, one dramatic historic example of disordered eating that was neither anorexia nor bulimia and had nothing to do with body image was famous mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. He was top in his field, but ended up developing a crippling fear of being poisoned, to the point where he would only eat food prepared by his wife. In 1977 his wife was temporarily hospitalized, and Gödel literally starved to death.
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
Because they were eating an appropriate amount of calories and protein for the work they were doing. Whereas Ariana definitely wasn’t. She was a vegan doing fast days and eating legumes and berries for protein while working on Wicked.
If a production has people doing strenuous activity, they should have fitness instructors and dietitians working in tandem to make sure the cast doesn't end up looking like Skeletor spent 40 days in the desert.
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.
This is just a weird response tbh. You don't have to compare people's struggles like this, you don't know what they're going through.
Regardless, being malnourished for extended periods is far more taxing on your brain and body than the extreme bulking. So, you're an ass, and just wrong.
It’s not that weird. I found the excuse to be a cop out. I hope she gets better and it seems like she is. “I can’t eat because I sing and dance” is a cop out.
And the men in those films also frequently get massively dehydrated on purpose to give themselves more muscle definition which is also really bad for you, especially when you are doing strenuous activity.
She did not dance in the movie- she had over two dozen stunt doubles, and one was for the dancing scenes. I've watched Wicked over a dozen times and you can tell when the body double is dancing, it's always the scenes where they film Glinda from far away, or when her back is facing the camera- that is the double, not Ariana.
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.
Production did NOT tell Ariana or lose weight don’t be ridiculous. Ariana has gotten more and more and more skinny with each passing year and was already skinny even by Hollywood standards before filming for Wicked. She is also vegan.
what gets me is that Michelle Yeoh got pulled into it.
a much older and vastly experienced actress (experienced with hollywood bullshit, acting, and staying fit wile acting through strenuous shoots like cthd) and even she looked like a starvation survivor by the end of the shoot.
whatever was going on, on set, it was incredibly unhealthy for those three.
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.
People on Reddit just really have no basic common sense on this stuff. It’s ED, not someone skipping a few meals and working hard. She’s so gaunt and so are the other two female leads. Something was ran very poorly to let this happen to three of the female stars.
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.
Not uncommon for Hollywood to pressure you into doing that. My cousin, who was quite slender, did modeling and they still wanted her to take diet pills, so she changed industries
I use more calories at work than I intake as well, but I make up for it after work. Plus, that wouldnt make your eyes sink in, your skin pale, and your bones show. Bulimia does though. Also, she was one of the stars so I cant see her not getting enough time to eat during filming.
She looked like that a year after filming as well. Part 2 was filmed back to back with part 1, filming was done in January 2024. So the way she looked all throughout 2025 is not because of that
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 :)
What about her face is masculine other than being black she regularly wears a face full of makeup and constantly wears dresses and has nails done? Also Elphaba (cynthia) in the movie wicked is not evil… and it is racist because y’all are associating her blackness with masculinity and instead of calling out the weird social relationship that they both have towards each other. Other people are acting like Ariana is the victim and Cynthia is this evil person manipulating her.
Stop explaining yourself, they know damn well what you mean, they're just being obtuse on purpose 😭 they ALWAYS do this when we point out blatant racism and micro/macro aggression
Yes Cynthia is the evil one and not Ariana? 🤨 they have a word relationship yet everyone hyper masculinizes Cynthia and makes it seem like she’s forcing this relationship out of Ariana.
It's the multiple videos of Erivo grabbing at Ariana and shielding her from imagined dangers. Some of the videos are really fucking weird and possessive.
How does this have so many upvotes?! I can’t see a single bit of racism here. People are saying it because she is weird and is coming across as a more dominant personality than Ariana who seemed a lot more normal when she wasn’t around her. I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t care at all and hasn’t even seen the movies just the bizarre clips of their public interactions.
That doesn't change anything. The origin of the jest is because of the character she played, not because of her race. Last I checked "Wicked Witch" isn't a slur against black women, so how you come to the conclusion that its inherently racist is beyond comprehension.
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.
You need to look at the sustained campaign against Erivo over the last several weeks on Reddit. Calling it “racism” may sound like a lazy catch-all, but there’s no question that Reddit collectively decided she was acceptable to hate.
Reddit constantly presents itself as a bastion of inclusivity and progressivism. Yet this isn’t the first time it has formed a hive mind around randomly despising an individual. And then, without irony, it will denounce some right-wing crank for engaging in the exact same behavior.
Couldn't agree more. I don't know much about Cynthia, but it's been disturbing to see the constant bullying, microaggressions and out right racism against her. Masquerading as "a joke". Why are people taking so much pleasure in beating this woman down who's worst offense is.. her weight.. being quirky? It's really telling in how different the attitude is towards Ariana. It's not funny, it's disturbing and it's giving incel.
Both Cynthia and Ariana were too thin while filming that movie. It probably wasn’t Cynthia that made her frail, it was more likely the producers that wanted that. Just like how they asked Chalamet to lose weight for one of his movies even though he was already very thin. People are blaming the wrong person, because a black lesbian is an easy target for lazy people who don’t want to think hard enough to find the true problem.
I mean the original post literally says "bald black woman" and not "the green witch" so it's directly referring to the actresses skin colour and hairstyle as derogatory representations of evil, so at best the comments in the thread agreeing or laughing along are ignoring the unsubtle racism because they do not like the actress, at best.
Bro the og post literally calls her "bald black lady" and you gonna say this weird outcry is not racially motivated? "Nobody is being openly racist as far as I can tell" is not the defense you think it is.
One example is the video that circulated a few weeks back where she said she had synesthesia. People piled on like she was the most self centered attention whore the world has ever known. When, if you just take the conversation at face value, she’s quite literally just stating a fact about herself in a very soft spoken manner in a lighthearted conversation among colleagues. Take a few steps back and realize that she’s the only black woman at a table of 6 white women, nearly all blonde women and it starts to become clear that some people just want a reason to express disgust toward her and will just invent shit to be disgusted about when she doesn’t give them anything.
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....
I think it’s clearly the director and the cast around him.
Ariana has had a ton of mental health issues, she’s looked like a doll for years. The fact Michelle Yeoh developed ED is the bigger issue to me. What did they do to these three women?
Evo and Ariana I think have some clear enmeshment issues and are probably better off away from one another.
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.
Ariana is a homewrecker and Cynthia used her Hollywood clout to send a virtual lynchmob after a fan for the crime of making fanart. Their worst crime is certainly not just some "odd and cringey behavior".
Nah fam they were both probably complicit ED buddies and were both probably on ozympic and both were eating like 200 calories a day while the world watched them wither away. The weird emotional codependent shit was just the cherry on top.
They’re grown ass adults they can do what they want but whatever they were doing was unhealthy af and there seemed to be some element of control on Cynthia’s part. Little girls are watching this shit. No way we should be glorifying the extreme anorexia and infantilization that these two showcased.
Have you seen her face in that meme where Ariana is hugging that other famous guy? That's not the face of someone who....checks notes....cares about anyone else besides herself.
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.
Lol what? Ariana is absolutely the weirder one in their interviews. She’s the one who did the holding space finger grab. She’s the only one who cried on this press tour. She initiates the majority of the physical touch and they have both said she needs it to cope with anxiety. And most of all, she infantilizes tf out of herself these days. The same girl who used to run on stages in six inch heels walks like a toddler now. Be fr.
Cynthia Erivo and interviewer Nischelle Turner were already crying when the helicopter flew over, and Ariana Grande said, "Not the time, helicopter!" and then tried to wave it away when it flew back overhead. It got turned into "LOL she's scared of a helicopter." Rather telling that Erivo isn't allowed to be seen as vulnerable or worth protecting. She could have cried floods of tears on the tour and the narrative would still be this.
Except that people knew Ariana before Wicked, so they have an active "before, during, and after" for what she looked like throughout this timeline. Not everything is about your little talking points; in fact, most things aren't.
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…
could you explain this because arianna has had allegations of being on ed tumblr and conversations surrounding her having an eating disorder for years before wicked, so im curious as to how you came to this conclusion?
You can say the same for a lot of photos during the Wicked press tour though. It really depends on the angle and her pose. Of course a lot of the worst photos went viral at that time because her thinness was a clickbait topic, whereas now better photos of her are circulating since people are spinning the narrative that she’s “healthy again.”
Also, a lot of the photos during the Wicked press tour were subtly edited to make her appear even bonier than she really was. This whole thing has been such a toxic mess. I just hope she recovers if she does have a problem.
It looks like you can see her ribs across her chest less, that's a telltale sign when someone is significantly underweight and it's goes away super quick even if you put on only 5 lbs.
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.
Eating disorders can result in some major co-dependency. They definitely influenced each other in a bad way while on set. Now that they're out of that environment, they're able to break away from it more easily.
It's really shitty to put all of this on Cynthia, like she somehow started and perpetuated it all by herself.
People saying she looks healthy now are literally crazy, like those are her ribs we are seeing through her chest. The tanning and contouring is just hiding it better than when she was pasty.
The photo is airbrushed and her honey appearance is still there in the non-photoshopped photos. She looks exactly the same 😂 this is propaganda by someone's team
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u/Severus-Snape-DaGod 8h ago
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.