Originally appeared on E! Online.
No good scene goes off without a hitch.
And when one is dealing with the likes of Cynthia Erivo singing “No Good Deed” in “Wicked: For Good,” it’s best to just let her genius run free. It’s why director Jon M. Chu was happy to make a change to the blocking for the movie-stopping number: originally, Elphaba was going to be on the move at the song’s open, forcing Erivo to unrig from her harness mid-shot.
“She did those versions of it, but one time she was like, ‘I don’t want to unrig and do the whole thing, it’s throwing me. Let me just do it here,'” Chu told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Nov. 26. “And she does it, and she’s just in it, and that’s the take we use. That’s why it’s messy — because our camera [operator] didn’t know it was happening. I forgot to tell them.”
Ultimately, Chu found the stillness to be even more moving.
“I mean, she’s in a room alone, singing that while we’re shooting this,” he recalled. “There is nothing around her; she is making the whole f—— scene. It’s pretty awesome.”
READ: Why Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey’s “Passionate” Kiss Was Cut From Wicked: For Good
But what might constitute “messy” to a trained eye like Chu’s translates into a powerhouse number for viewers, with Erivo standing in place and baring Elphaba’s soul — and the many injustices and hardships she’s lived —through song.
And despite the Herculean task of bringing all that to life, the Crazy Rich Asians director always knew Erivo had it in her — after all, she’d done it before.
“We already knew what she can do, she did it in ‘Defying Gravity,’” Chu reflected. “But ‘No Good Deed’ is not just a declaration, it is a struggle to find herself. It is Elphaba surrendering to herself — and there’s pain and anguish in that surrender. It’s questioning her past.”
He added, “I think it’s one of the greatest single performances of a musical sequence in a movie of all time. She is a revelation.”
And sometimes, the most moving moments of a film are those that went unscripted or were left to chance. Take, for example, Erivo and Ariana Grande’s emotional goodbye during “For Good,” which — spoiler alert — sees Elphaba and Glinda tell the other they love them before sobbing on either side of a closed door.
“The moment that I tell her I love her at the door, and she says it back, that was not in the script,” Erivo revealed to “TODAY” following the film’s release. “All of that was sort of what she and I found in the room.”
For Erivo, Chu’s decision to let her and Grande simply explore made all the difference.
“I think both of us were just figuring out how each of our characters would actually say goodbye,” she said. “Even through the song, there wasn’t much direction. He just let us sing to one another. Tell each other the truth.”
