Cynthia Erivo Says the ‘Bodyguard’ Memes After She Protected Ariana Grande Were About Race — and They Killed Her Oscar Drive

Cynthia Erivo has spent months sitting with what happened in Singapore, and now she’s ready to say what she thinks it was really about.

In a Variety cover story published Wednesday, Erivo gives her most detailed account of the November 2025 incident at the Wicked: For Good Singapore premiere — and goes further, connecting the viral fallout to something she says the public hasn’t wanted to confront. At the event, a man named Jonathan Wen vaulted over a barricade and grabbed Ariana Grande on the red carpet. Erivo stepped in immediately.

"Nobody moved. Nobody moved," she recalls. "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." Wen was jailed for nine days and banned from Singapore for the incident.

Most coverage praised her instincts. But a parallel narrative ran alongside it: memes, jokes, and TikTok videos casting Erivo as Grande’s "bodyguard" — playing on the physical contrast between the two women. Erivo is direct about what she saw in those videos.

"I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women," she tells Variety. "And I’m sure people will read this and think, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, it’s not about that.’ But it is. 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."

How It Affected the Oscars

Erivo says the incident and its aftermath took the wind out of her willingness to campaign for a Best Actress nomination for Wicked: For Good. She had already received a nomination for the first film; the sequel, which completed the $1.2 billion two-film franchise, received no Oscar nominations at all.

"I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized," she says. "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."

She adds that the season was already colored by what she perceived as a "sort of upturned nose at the second installment, even though we all knew there was a second film coming and we were just doing our jobs." Per Us Weekly, Erivo also noted the toll of the Oscar campaign window itself: "If it was a shorter stint of time, there is less potential for things to turn sour, and also there’s more energy to keep it going."

On her friendship with Grande, she says it has survived everything. "I think that people didn’t really believe that we were actually friends," she says. "But that’s also because people don’t know me very well. If I’m a friend, then I’m a friend. If I’m not, then I’m not." The two still text almost every day.

What Comes Next

Erivo is currently starring in Dracula, a one-woman show at the Noël Coward Theatre in London in which she plays 23 characters and delivers roughly 20,000 words of dialogue over two hours. She’s also announced her next film role: The Road Home, in which she’ll play South African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba.

The roles she’s dreaming about after that? A monster for Guillermo del Toro, and Storm from the X-Men, which she calls "a childhood fantasy of mine."

As for Wicked 3: "It’s too soon to even begin to have the conversation about it," she says. "It would take a lot to get me back to do it. It has to make sense."