Cynthia Erivo has argued that online jokes about her being Ariana Grande’s “bodyguard” are rooted in racist perceptions of her.
Last year, at the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good, a man jumped the barricade and went for Grande, putting his arm round her and jumping up and down. Grande froze in shock, while Erivo swiftly moved to separate him from her co-star. Amid praise for her quick thinking, there were jokes and caricatures about the actor being Grande’s “bodyguard”, which Erivo criticised in a new interview with Variety.
“I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women. And I’m sure people will read this and think, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, it’s not about that.’ But it is,” she said. “Because that’s what was being made fun of. 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 co-star and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role. I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around.”
Recalling the moment to the outlet, she said: “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.’ And what people couldn’t see is that he wouldn’t let go [of Grande]. He wouldn’t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off.”
She concluded: “A stranger is a stranger. Personal space is still personal space. It doesn’t belong to anyone, even if you feel you know the person. In that moment, we were all terrified.”
Late last year, SZA brought up what she described as “classic Misogynoir” (a term used for sexism specifically aimed at Black women) regarding the coverage of Erivo following the premiere incident. “Everyone’s gonna have cognitive dissonance two years later like ‘remember when everyone attacked Cynthia for being black bald and nurturing?… that was crazy’” she wrote on social media. “It could [just] stop now lol.”