It can be hard to say “I love you” — but in the Emerald City, it was actually a forbidden phrase. Well, at least forbidden by Wicked: For Good director Jon M. Chu.
“Nobody says ‘love’ in Oz. That was a rule that we came into this movie with,” the filmmaker tells Entertainment Weekly.
But then a rehearsal with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo changed all that.
During an improvisation exercise for the “For Good” scene at the end of the film, the actresses devised a scenario in which they were separated by a closet door. The version that made it to screen has become a key moment for fans: Glinda in tears, reaching out to her friend, and Elphaba on the other side, reaching back for a moment before going off to meet her destiny with Dorothy.
“I just realized, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the moment,'” Chu says. “[Singing] ‘For Good’ is them being there for each other. But the closet is when they can act how they really feel. That door closes, it’s like that moment that you say goodbye to someone, and you’re home alone, and the silence, and you can now let it all out.”
Chu ultimately felt, with all Glinda and Elphaba had been through together by this point in the film, “They can say I love you because they’ve earned the right to say I love you.”
The director also credits the success of the first Wicked film for giving him “the freedom” to break his own rule.
“We realized the audience is in and they want the characters to grow. I knew I could fight off any note about catching anybody up about any plot,” he says. “It’s not about the plot, ‘It’s about the girls, stupid,’ is what was repeated over and over.”