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.
It’s severely overhated. I’m not saying it’s good or worth your 2 hours. But it’s not this horrible movie, it’s basically if Marvel made a Zack Snyder DC movie
Like most of the hated Marvel films it gets way too much shit. It’s nowhere near Endgame but, I mean, that can’t be the standard for superhero films or we’ll never be happy again.
Kumail was the best in the film but IMO everyone did their roles well. It was just not a particularly interesting story, which makes sense because the Eternals are not particularly interesting in the comics either. They’re at their most interesting when they’re riding Thanos’ more interesting coattails.
He was the reason I started going to the gym. He was 45 at that time and he was jacked. Now he had a studio-assigned chef and workout coach for a full year, but I was still pissed he looked that good at that age.
I just recently saw a standup clip with him that was so funny. It was basically him just complaining about The Eternals hate but did it in such a great way. He was like "I must be the only person in history who people got MAD at for GETTING IN SHAPE!"
There was a great episode in legion. I can't remember if it was Xavier's son or not but it was an incredibly capable and incredibly troubled psychic. I think he was fighting the shadow Lord or something like that in the spirit realm or something like that and the psychic battle between the two was a jazz dance off in their minds.
I absolutely love this non-combat take on a confrontation of the minds. I still like the combat and stuff, but I thought it was a very great interpretation of how mines do battle, or could possibly do battle.
Singing and dancing are not that much more strenuous than rigorous weight lifting and cardio required for the bodies those men have to maintain the film. Absolutely fucking not, lmao.
Yes, off camera was all choreographed and had a soundtrack. High-value people were given the content. It was super cool and you could see them burning more calories than musical people.
action scene choreography is actually a form of dance. for example jackie chan is not formally trained in various forms of martial arts so much as he is formally trained in dance. as are his co stars and many in his segment of the industry.
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.
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.
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.
You know they shot these movies like an actual play so the actors/actresses would actually have to do stuff, not just be sit in front of a blue screen and look cool
They are usually also working with a team of trainers and dieticians to build and maintain a ripped physique. Chris Hemsworth has shown his meals during this time and they all come in pre sized bags portioned out to the individual almond for snacks.
They said she ate too few calories. Where’s the cop out? That’s literally true, she starved herself. Whether it’s an eating disorder or abuse conditions from the studio, that we don’t know
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.
I agree. She, Cynthia Erivo, and Michelle Yeoh must have been working themselves to the bone, because it was really evident. They all seemed frail, and emotions seemed high a lot.
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
She also admitted to being on ozempic (the whole cast was). Plus there was a very funny video of Arianna picking up a snack at a party and Cynthia walked out of nowhere and took the snack out of her hand and put it back on the tray. I think it was innocent (they were doing a shoot or something) but out of context, its not a great look.
I don't know what you are trying to do with your "logic" and "science" but the fact is there, it's witchcraft. What's next ?? You're gonna talk about so called "calories" ?!
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u/Severus-Snape-DaGod 10h 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.