Ariana Grande and me: Wicked star BRONWYN JAMES on how she bonded with her famous co-star and all the backstage secrets of this year's biggest film that's already netted £130m
The first time Bronwyn James went to London was on a school outing in 2006, when she was 12. The drama club at her comprehensive in Wakefield made the 400-odd-mile round trip to the Apollo Theatre, Victoria, where Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical Wicked was just getting comfy for its epic run – 18 years to date and counting.
James was transfixed. ‘You know when you watch something and you’re just pretending you’re in it?’
Now 30, James is in it. The British newcomer, who stars in the £252 million two-part movie adaptation of Wicked, spent the film’s Los Angeles premiere being photographed on the red carpet, dressed in Christian Siriano, beside her co-stars Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey.
In fact she has spent most of the past three years in North London’s Elstree Studios with pop megastar Grande, who plays Glinda the (not-so) Good Witch of the North. They became such great mates, says James, that ‘whenever we had downtime between scenes, we’d all usually pile into one person’s dressing tent and play [word] games or have a good natter to pass the time.
‘I remember one day when we were all hanging out, we somehow got on to the subject of Jennifer Coolidge. Anyone who knows Ariana knows she does a flawless Coolidge impression. She started doing it, I joined in and she whipped her head round, wide-eyed, like, “Oh my god, I didn’t know you could do her!’” When they weren’t mimicking Coolidge together they were busy comparing their favourite Hermione quotes from Harry Potter – another mutual favourite.
Wicked bonds people like that. A radical musical reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, the film gives us the origin stories of Glinda and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, played by British actress Cynthia Erivo (who is sensational). It’s a riot of a movie, capped by a standout turn from Jeff Goldblum as the not-so-wizardous Wizard. The film picked up four stars from The Times, The Guardian and this paper, which called it ‘a fabulous spectacle, which demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible’.
Shirt, Palmer Harding. Trousers, River Island. Earrings, Ysso. Bow tie, Hawes & Curtis. Bracelet, Wanni Fuga. Shoes, Hobbs. Ring, Bronwyn’s own
Good thing, too. Universal Pictures aims to do for green this autumn what Barbie did for pink. Wicked has gone head-to-head with Gladiator II, and while we won’t know if we’re in another Barbenheimer frenzy (Glicked?) until we’re in it, experts were already anticipating at least £65 million in takings for its US opening last weekend (Wicked part two arrives next November).
The company has also conjured a dizzying array of branded merchandise: eyeshadows, dolls, £43 Stanley cups, Squishmallows, Barbies, even fuzzy pink-and-green slippers that, New York magazine’s website The Cut says, ‘when viewed from a distance, make the wearer look as if they have a tropical foot disease’. Then there was London’s Greenwich – recast by the film’s marketing wonks as ‘GreenWitch’, with its walking trail and installations, for the lead-up to the launch.
From left: Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey and Bronwyn James at Wicked’s LA premiere last month
It’s all been a whirlwind for James. Her stage and screen career so far has taken in Martin McDonagh’s play Hangmen (opposite David Morrissey) and TV shows like Harlots, Ghosts and Wild Bill. But passing six auditions to land the part of ShenShen in Wicked has elevated her to another league. She plays one of Glinda’s hangers-on, forming a bitchy double act with Bowen Yang. She’s front and centre for the first half of the film – set at Shiz University for magic and spell-casting, in the fantastical land of Oz – delivering withering put-downs to less ‘popular’ classmates. (Think of the ‘Plastics’, played by Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried, in the 2004 film Mean Girls.) Which means she has spent months cavorting around a huge fibreglass university telling herself, ‘We’re not in Wakefield any more’.
We’re talking over tea in London, just days before James flies out to LA for that premiere – exciting mainly as it’s a chance for a reunion, she says: ‘I had a text about it from Ariana the other day [saying she couldn’t wait to see James]. We all went back home [when filming was over] but everyone was so amazing it would’ve been tough not to keep in contact. So we all stay in touch.’
Working with Grande, says James, ‘was an absolute dream – every single day she’d walk on to the set and everyone’s spirits would go up. She’s got a really fun, happy-to-be-here energy. Cynthia’s the same. She walks into the room and everyone’s like, “It’s going to be a good day now.”’
In Harlots (2017), with Samantha Morton, left
Viewed from the perspective of 2024, the cinematic version of Wicked might seem like a predictable extension of a megabucks brand. The Broadway musical was the fastest in history to gross more than $1 billion and has been a fixture there and in the West End since it opened. Moreover, the big screen adaptation has been in the works since 2012.
But there was never any guarantee that it would become a hit. The musical is based on the rather dark, subversive 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, which features a Wizard of Oz who lies through his teeth, a Yellow Brick Road built on slave labour, animal genocide and many Munchkin rights violations. It was loved by LGBTQ+ readers but was still obscure when Schwartz decided to set it to music. Even when the musical premiered on Broadway in 2003, it didn’t get the best reviews. The Guardian later said the London production was ‘more like a piece of industrial product than something that genuinely touches the heart or mind’.
Yet it has run and run. Songs like ‘Popular’ and ‘Defying Gravity’ became karaoke standards. The themes of moral compromise and fakery have resonated in an era of political mistrust, and teenage girls have taken nerdy heroine Elphaba to their hearts. A New York Times critic, revisiting the show a decade after it received a decidedly mixed review, identified the musical as a precursor to the likes of The Hunger Games and Frozen: ‘In retrospect Wicked seems an early sign of the cultural clout… of a generation of girls (and now women) whose desire to see, and read, and sing along with stories about female empowerment has become a snowballing trend.’
Bronywn and Katherine on their wedding day, 2023
James is very much a member of Generation Wicked. ‘The story of Elphaba is one that so many people can relate to in massive ways,’ she says. The narrative resonates for her as a gay woman who came out when she was in her late teens having spent most of her teenage years suffering from bullying. ‘You don’t go through school in the 2010s as a fat ginger and not get bullied,’ is how she puts it.
She is now married to Katherine, who runs a charity in Wakefield, and she comes from a close-knit family she clearly adores. Her mum Hazel works with schoolchildren and is apparently the source of all of her dramatic genes (‘I’m a carbon copy in that we’re both show-offs’). Her dad Darren is a policeman and a ‘typical no-nonsense Yorkshireman’. Her elder sister Megan has just had a baby.
Everyone realised little Bronwyn was destined for the stage when she was cast in a primary school nativity play as the Angel Gabriel and threw a tantrum because she wanted a much bigger role: Mary. ‘My one line in the production was, “Lo, a child is born,”’ she recalls. ‘It came time to do it in front of all the parents and I said, “Lo, I want to be Mary”, and threw my wand down. Everyone started laughing and I remember going, “Ooh, I’ve found my audience now”.’
Dress, Georgia Hardinge. Earrings, Ysso
James says she managed to stand up to her bullies at secondary school first by finding her own ‘tribe of weirdos,’ in the small band of kids who also liked fantasy and musical theatre. ‘You enter it and you’re like, “These are my people, this is my tribe. These are people I can find safety with.”’
She has also cultivated a long-term ‘vengeance strategy’ of turning anyone who is (or has been) mean to her into a character. ShenShen is a composite of ‘two or three’ unpleasant people from school as well as various LA influencers she found on YouTube. ‘Any time you get to play a baddie or a mean girl, it’s really fun. You get to tap into all those people in your past and turn them into caricatures.’
It was clearly great fun shooting the movie. Wicked departs from the many modern productions that incorporate computer-generated projections, being filmed largely on physical sets, constructed at enormous expense in Elstree Studios, where the Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies were shot. The result is an otherworldly, Oz-like feel.
Coat and earrings, Karen Millen. Shoes, Mango. Ring, Bronwyn’s own
‘The first day shooting I was like, “This is insane”,’ says James. ‘They built a mountain. They built a school into the mountain. They built a river that we had boats coming through. You could walk from the library to the classroom to the courtyard and touch everything.’ On the last day of filming, she found herself begging the prop department for any souvenirs from the set. Going home to Wakefield might have seemed like a bit of a comedown. ‘The second it finished, I was like, “Did that actually happen?”’
But the Wicked effect seems likely to endure. James has a small role opposite Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, the upcoming sci-fi movie from Bong Joon Ho, director of the South Korean smash hit Parasite, a hero of hers. She’s also in the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon which, if remotely as successful as its animated counterpart, should spawn numerous sequels.
‘Doing that job gave me the same feeling Wicked did. If I could go back and say to little 12-year-old Bronwyn, “You’re going to be in the film version one day”, it would blow her mind.’
Wicked (part one) is in cinemas nationwide
Wicked in numbers
65 million people internationally who’ve seen the show
£252 million budget for Universal’s movie, now split into parts one and two
5 million-plus sales of the Grammy-winning Broadway cast recording
£43 for a Wicked x Stanley Cup (before they sold out globally)
£3.9 billion revenue grossed worldwide by the Wicked juggernaut
70 brands licensed to sell Wicked (part one) collaborative ranges
5 million copies of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked book sold since 1995
9 make-up elements in Ariana Grande’s Rem Beauty x Wicked Collection Bundle
33 awards won by the Wicked Broadway production, including 3 Tonys
6,500 performances of the musical at London’s Apollo Theatre (so far)
130 cities to have staged Wicked
MAKING OF A HIT
1900 L Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz is published and sells out in a fortnight.
1939 MGM’s The Wizard of Oz is released. ‘Judy Garland… [right] is a… fresh-faced miss with the wonder-lit eyes of a believer in fairytales,’ says the New York Times.
1978 Adapted from the musical of the same name, Universal Pictures’ The Wiz has Dorothy tumbling into an urban R&B Oz.
1985 Disney’s unofficial sequel, Return to Oz, sees the magical land fall to an evil autocrat.
1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is published; author Gregory Maguire had sold 500,000 copies by the time it hit the stage.
2003 Wicked hits Broadway, with Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda and Idina Menzel as Elphaba (right, in 2006 with Helen Dallimore as Glinda). A ‘lumbering, overstuffed $14 million production’, says Variety.
2004 Menzel wins a Tony award for Best Actress in a Musical.
2006 The 1,000th Broadway show; the London launch.
2010 Menzel sings ‘Defying Gravity’ for Barack Obama at the White House.
2012 The musical makes $300+ million in profits for investors and creators; a film version is announced for 2019.
2013 James Franco stars as the wizard in Disney prequel Oz: The Great and Powerful.
2016 The musical soars past $4 billion in takings worldwide.
2018 Halting filming (production scheduling woes), Universal advances the film Cats – a box-office disaster.
2021 After many strikes and delays, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo (below) are confirmed as leads. Both get Covid while filming, so further hold-ups.
2022 Director Jon M Chu says it will be released in two parts to avoid ‘doing real damage to it’ with editing (and, presumably, to make even more money).
Fashion director: Sophie Dearden-Howell.
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Make-up: Liz Pugh at Premier using Make-Up by Mario.
Hair: Tim Crespin at Arlington Artists.
