Cynthia Erivo on Why She Nearly Skipped Oscar Campaign After Singapore Incident

When Cynthia Erivo stepped in to shield Ariana Grande from an intruder at the Wicked: For Good Singapore premiere in November 2025, it was instinct—pure, unfiltered human decency. A man rushed the stage. Nobody moved. So she did. She pushed him away. She protected a colleague. Simple as that.

Except the internet didn’t see it that way.

In an interview with Variety published on Wednesday, May 27, the 39-year-old Oscar nominee opened up about how the incident’s aftermath nearly cost her a chance at campaigning for another Academy Award nod. Erivo recalled the moment clearly:“Nobody moved. Nobody moved. So I moved because my brain went,‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’My immediate reaction was‘Get him away from us.'”She emphasized that Australian man Jonathan Wen, who was subsequently jailed for nine days for being a public nuisance and banned from Singapore, wouldn’t let go of Grande.“He wouldn’t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off.”

What followed was a storm of online mockery. The incident spawned jokes, memes, and TikTok videos that reframed her protective action as something else entirely—turning her into Grande’s“bodyguard,”complete with punchlines about her physique, her shaved head, her build. And there’s the rub. Erivo didn’t mince words about what she saw happening beneath the surface:“I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women.”She explained that the humor wasn’t about the moment itself. It was about her appearance.“It was my physique; it was my shape; it was the fact that I was bald; it was about what I looked like. And because of that, there was this assumption that I was bigger than my costar and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role.”

The toll was real. The incident made Erivo question whether she wanted to put herself through an Oscar campaign at all.“I think maybe in a way it did [put me off], actually. I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized,”she said.“I felt like something I did instinctively had been made to be something that it simply was not because of the way people see women who look like me and because of the assumptions that are made, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that, really and truly. I didn’t want to put myself through it. I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”

That decision hit different when Wicked: For Good received zero Oscar nominations earlier this year—a stark contrast to the first Wicked film, which earned 10 nods in 2025. Erivo suggested the snub reflected a broader dismissal of the sequel from the start. As for a third installment, she’s not ready to commit.“It’s too soon to even begin to have the conversation about it. It would take a lot to get me back to do it. It has to make sense.”

What Erivo’s candor reveals is something worth sitting with: a moment of genuine heroism got recycled into a punchline, and that punchline carried weight. It wasn’t just funny. It was rooted in how society perceives Black women—their strength mistaken for aggression, their appearance weaponized, their humanity erased in favor of a viral moment. That’s the real story nobody was joking about.