The Right Thinks Wicked Is Too Woke
Most of the wall-to-wall coverage of Wicked has focused on one of two things: its absolutely unhinged press tour and the fact that the movie is objectively really good in spite of it including a drum solo by a sugar glider. Some conservatives, however, have a slightly different take. They seem baffled by the idea that a film about love, inclusion, and self-acceptance in a hostile world could possibly strike a nerve with the general public — or maybe they’re just realizing, to quote the immortal words of Euphoria’s Maddy Perez, that this fucking play is about them (and they are not the good guys!).
The “Wicked is too woke” backlash started unfolding last week when Dr. Gina Loudon, a co-chair of Women for Trump 2020 and host on the far-right streaming network Real America’s Voice News, went on a rant about how Wicked was “racist against white people.” “I should’ve known they’d try to make it woke in the ways that they could think of,” Loudon said. “Let’s just start with the fact that they have Ariana Grande, who is obviously a Hispanic woman, playing the part of a ditzy, blonde, white villain, when it comes down to it. The racism and the racial appropriation I just thought was offensive, frankly.” Grande, for the record, is Italian American. But that didn’t stop Candace Owens from making a similar claim on her podcast on Monday, when she claimed that Grande usually “has a Latina girl accent” but changed her speaking voice for the Wicked role. Grande, I should point out, has attributed her shift in vocal tone to her preparation for the role. Also, Wicked is not biased for or against any specific demographic, except, perhaps, altos.
But these concerns about a white woman playing the role of a white woman were outdone only by Krysia Lenzo, a co-host for Newsmax’s Wake Up America show. In a segment last week, Lenzo took umbrage with a comment Grande made in an interview in which she said “Oz is a very queer place. It has always been, even from the L. Frank Baum books.” By suggesting that some (fictional) inhabitants of the (again, fictional) land of Oz might (fictionally) be queer, Grande, Lenzo said, was “inserting herself and making things go woke, and as we know, if you go woke, you go broke. So I don’t think this strategy is going to work, especially with big-box retailers like Walmart breaking away from this ideology and DEI.” Meanwhile, Walmart is currently selling dozens of Wicked-branded products, including sweatshirts, bed sheets, sleep masks, hairbrushes, and macaroni and cheese.
It’s not just the movie itself that has prompted criticism from the right — many blue-checkmark accounts on X (formerly known as Twitter) seem enraged with the Wicked press tour, too. Both the managing editor of the right-wing publication the Babylon Bee and the account End Wokeness reposted a clip of Erivo crying while talking about how wearing green makeup made her feel more beautiful. People in the replies lambasted the stars’ “narcissism” and “self-importance,” arguing that their behavior was somehow emblematic of a larger pathology inherent to liberals and Hollywood in general. “These are the kinds of people who really should not get power and unfortunately these are the kinds of people who do go into government,” Owens said on her podcast, summarizing Grande’s behavior as “fake and gay.” She also compared her to politicians like Justin Trudeau, since both of them are former “theater kids.” (Though, to be fair to Owens, theater kids are indeed insufferable, as anyone who has ever witnessed them break into song at a Denny’s can attest.)
It’s worth noting that none of this is particularly new. When Warner Bros. released Barbie in 2023, the right was also weird about the film’s inclusive casting and message about female empowerment; the hashtag #BoycottBarbie very briefly trended before disappearing into the ether. Nonetheless, the movie was a huge hit, smashing box-office records and grossing almost $1.5 billion worldwide, despite conservatives’ best efforts to accuse the film of spreading communist propaganda or Matt Gaetz’s wife’s claim that Ken, a character who canonically lacks male genitalia, had “disappointingly low T.”
Similarly, Wicked has made more than $360 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film adaptation of a Broadway musical of all time. That’s to say nothing of the original — and canonically, extremely queer — musical, which is currently in the 20th year of its Broadway run and has grossed more than $1.5 billion. Good to know that some people are still able to be normal about things!
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