Wicked: For Good

The darker half of Wicked’s story, Wicked: For Good follows Elphaba Thropp after defying the Wizard of Oz and being branded the Wicked Witch of the West. Directed by Jon M. Chu, the film stars Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Marissa Bode, Ethan Slater, Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum. Both For Good and the previous installment adapt the Wicked Broadway musical, which in turn adapted the 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

All three iterations of the story grapple with broader themes of what it means to be good and how propaganda can obscure a corrupt regime, though the musical has notably sanded down the edges of the novel. Recently, Erivo, who portrays Elphaba, discussed how these themes shaped her iteration of the witch: “I’ve never seen Elphaba as an evil character, but I think […] what was clarified for me is that perception is everything.“

“What we see as good, and what we see as evil can be warped and shifted, depending on who’s, who we are looking at, and through what eyes, through what lens we’re looking through,” continued Erivo. “So if we, depending on how you feel about a certain type of person, depending on how you feel about the skin the person is living in, depending on how you feel the person sounds or looks, is what, is the lens we look through.”

Likewise, Erivo noted that the concept of goodness is subjective. “How we use the word ‘good,’ is it really good? Or is it a sort of, an apparition of good?“ the actress mused. “The difference between what good actually is, and what good can be perceived to be, and what evil actually is, and what evil can be perceived to be. And who we can actually lay the blame on, and how easy it is to push it on someone else.“

For her part, Grande, who plays Elphaba’s estranged friend and a pawn of the Wizard, stated: “I love the question the movie asks.” She then added she appreciates how For Good “invites people to consider why those labels are kind of projected so easily.“

“People are kind of the accumulation of all of their experiences, of their hurt and of their things, and sort of we live in a time [when] everything is erased of context and humanness, and things are boiled down to a quick soundbite or a quick headline,” Grande said, addressing the politically tinged message of the film. “And I think that, while people can do good things, and people can do wicked things, it’s an interesting theme in the story, to ask people to look for the humanness, or what might be on the other side. You never really know the whole story. You don’t know.“

Though Elphaba’s crusade against the Wizard is justified, the whole of Oz doesn’t see it that way, and Glinda is forced to choose between being good and performing goodness. Their shared journey reaches its climactic finale when Wicked: For Good releases in theaters on November 21, 2025.