WICKED Director Jon M. Chu Originally Wanted to Cast "No-Namers" for the Lead Roles

Wicked has been rocking the box office over the past couple of weeks and fans and audiences are loving what the first film has delivered.

As a fan of the Broadway musical, I thought the movie was great. I also enjoyed the performances of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo even though I wasn’t initially really a fan of their casting. They won me over.

Well, it turns out that when director Jon M. Chu set out on the journey of bringing this musical to life on the big screen, he initially wanted to cast no name actresses in the lead roles of Glinda and Elphaba.

In an interview with GamesRader+, the director explained: "I wanted to have a very clear slate coming into Wicked. It's a big enough property on its own, so we can discover two people.

“I was like, 'We're gonna find no-namers'. But then we got calls from all these great actresses who wanted to audition and we saw everybody, and they were all really great.”

He added: “Anyone could have done this role, except there were two people who were meant to do this role, for this particular movie at this particular time.

When talking about the casting process, Chu said: "What we found out when we were auditioning everyone, was that the songs are so important in this movie, and so emotionally important to this movie, that the person who's doing it has to get into song and out of song so easily that it's like butter, like you don't even notice it. That means having good chops in their skill set."

After going through that process of auditioning tons of actresses, Chu felt that Granda and Erivo had the chops in their skill set to play these characters, and they didn’t disappoint.