Cynthia Erivo is contemplating her favourite crisps, the ridged American brand Ruffles, as we sit talking in a quiet corner of a west London restaurant. Dressed all in black and sporting her signature elongated nails, she is known for her healthy lifestyle, but everyone, it seems, has their vices. “Ruffles are just perfect,” she says. “When you get a good batch, and the salt-to-potato ratio is perfect … it’s amazing.”
Erivo has just touched down after singing in Phoenix, Arizona, the night before, and has been running me through the health routine that helps her maintain her frantic schedule. Before her concert, there was the Dior front row at Paris fashion week, and she has just been announced as a guest host on SNL UK. Erivo doesn’t drink alcohol (today she orders some peppermint tea); she’s vegan; she doesn’t eat airline food, only her own prepacked meals. She even has an infra-red sauna “to help me heal from the inside”. Earlier this year she ran the London Marathon before jumping on stage to perform Dracula, where she played all 23 parts; she had rehearsed her lines while going on gruelling marathon training runs. All that requires discipline – and snacks – to keep the show on the road.
She has flown in this morning to promote her new film, the legal drama Prima Facie, an adaptation of the one-woman Suzie Miller play about sexual assault, in which Jodie Comer wowed audiences in 2022. Erivo bristles when I ask if she was hesitant about picking up a role so associated with someone else. “I get asked that question a lot,” she says. The pair actually met at a fashion dinner and spoke about the role – “Not asking any tips or anything” – and Erivo insists she was always going to make Tessa her own. “I’m never worried about what someone else has done,” she says. “I try to be respectful.”
Erivo plays a rising-star barrister, well versed in defending men accused of sexual assault. Tessa knows how to dance around the courtroom – and the victim – raising inconsistencies that mean convicting a man “beyond reasonable doubt” becomes almost impossible. When Tessa is raped by a colleague, her world implodes and it’s made clear just how brutal the British justice system can be for women, who, according to Rape Crisis, have a one in four chance of being sexually assaulted, while only 2.7% of reported rapes result in charges being brought.
Miller, a former barrister herself, said the inspiration for the story came from her realisation that: “It’s almost impossible to actually run a sexual assault case and win it.” Tessa, says Erivo, doesn’t see how hard it is for anyone to recall traumatic events in detail, or how lopsided the system is, until it’s swallowing her whole. “I don’t think she realises that until she’s on the other side. I think it’s only then she realises what she’s been asking other people to do – when it comes to recall – is actually impossible.”
Is Erivo hopeful the film can have a lasting impact? “We have had judges see it, we’ve had lawyers see it, [but] one of the major issues is the way we view consent,” says Erivo. “I hope that as this film filters out, we start to have a conversation not just among us as people, but within law.”
The film’s central struggle is twofold: the legal system victims have to navigate, and the bigger question of consent, which is something Erivo thinks is often far simpler than it seems. “I think we’re very wishy-washy when it comes to what consent is, when we shouldn’t be,” she says, leaning forward. “It’s very clear what consent is: if a person isn’t conscious, or conscious enough to say yes, they’re not saying yes. If a person doesn’t say yes, they don’t say yes. If the body language doesn’t say yes, they don’t say yes.”
Tessa’s rise through the legal ranks as a working-class Black woman mirrors Erivo’s ascent through the West End, Broadway and Hollywood. After arriving at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), Erivo had to traverse a strange world, deeply rooted in tradition and privilege that she wasn’t exposed to growing up in south London.
When I ask Erivo what it was like navigating that space she gives a one-word answer: “Hard.” She held down three jobs, including working every imaginable role at the Stratford East theatre, while classmates with means simply had to turn up. “I was exhausted all the time,” she says. “We’re in the classes, and it’s a Monday; I’ve worked all day on a Sunday, and probably done a gig at night, and I’ve come in. I’m falling asleep in class, so people were like: ‘She doesn’t care.’”
Erivo tells me the story about how she had to turn down a backing singer gig with Westlife that would have lasted two weeks and paid her £10,000 – enough for a couple of years’ tuition. “When I went to the registrar to say, ‘Hey, can I take these two weeks to go and do this? It will pay for my fees,’ they said, ‘No, you can’t. If you go, you leave. If you stay, you stay.’” Erivo says the incident showed how at Rada there could often be “a deep misunderstanding of what it is like to need money”, which is something she is trying to address in the role she has held since 2024 as vice-president of the institution.
“I want it to be different,” she says. “Rada is not an easy place to go to school. It asks a lot of you. If you’re a kid who is just really talented, but you’ve not picked up a Shakespeare before, you now have to learn a new language. If you’ve never read a Greek before, now you have to understand what anything means with the Greeks. That’s a big shift from doing plays at school.”
James Norton was in Erivo’s year at Rada and recently recalled how she would occasionally burst into song, something she had been doing since her school days in Clapham, where she’d perform Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine in the playground. “The room would go completely silent,” said Norton, which is no surprise because despite Erivo being little over 5ft tall, she possesses a gigantic voice. It’s a tool capable of the grandstanding volume needed for musical theatre, but also the subtler demands of R&B. In her forthcoming memoir, Erivo recalls being asked at Rada to sing the parts of a white student who was ill, but rather than being replaced was allowed to mime along. “The powers that be took my voice away and gave it to someone else,” is how she described it. In 2020 Rada apologised for institutional racism, later publishing an anti-racism action plan and appointing David Harewood president alongside Erivo.
Erivo set about reclaiming that voice in her post-Rada career, at first mostly on the stage, including a star-making Broadway turn in 2015 as Celie in The Color Purple. The New Yorker’s Hilton Als went to see the production not expecting much (he’d been disappointed by the film adaptation) but remembers Erivo’s Celie as being a revelation. “It was like listening to Judy Garland when she first started out,” he told me. “She keeps you marvelling at what is surely a God-given talent.” Erivo says that show was pivotal for her. “The Color Purple was one of those moments where I went from a jobbing actress and just pleased to be there to someone who was known for this particular piece. My life looked different after that.”
Before Broadway she’d had fleeting TV roles in Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and in Mr Selfridge, but things shifted again in 2018 when Erivo starred in Steve McQueen’s take on the Lynda La Plante, all-female heist story Widows. Hollywood took notice and she was cast as two African-American icons: the soul star Aretha Franklin and the abolitionist activist Harriet Tubman. But playing Tubman triggered a backlash. Some argued that because she is British-Nigerian, the casting was “disrespectful to African Americans” and part of a wider trend of Black British actors – including Daniel Kaluuya (who played Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah) and David Oyelowo (who played Dr Martin Luther King in Selma) – bagging roles that some felt should be reserved for Black Americans.
The criticism stung Erivo, and at the time she told the Guardian: “Before I’m British, I’m a Black woman. The first things people see are the colour of my skin and my sex.” I’m interested in her thoughts now, almost a decade on. “I still think it’s happening,” she says, answering almost before I’m able to get the question out. “And I think it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
“I think we could all just sit in a room and be like: ‘OK, so what’s the problem? What’s going on? How do we fix this? How do we stop doing this?’ Because nobody else does this. Nobody else is having this conversation. The Australians and the Americans and the English white folk are not having this conversation. They don’t care.” Does she have sympathy with the argument that African Americans do face – on average – more inbuilt disadvantages than some other Black immigrant groups who move to the US? “I have empathy,” she says. “But I also think that it’s hard for a Black English kid from London to also make it.”
In person, Erivo can be measured and precise, her arms and adorned fingernails spreading out wide when she wants to make a point. As we talk, she really comes alive when we discuss her experiences after the release of Wicked: For Good in 2025, the sequel to the 2024 adaptation of the long-running Wizard of Oz musical Wicked.
The film, a heartwarming story of friendship between Ariana Grande’s good witch, Glinda, and Erivo’s bad witch, Elphaba, swiftly became the highest-grossing movie adaptation of a stage musical. For Erivo, it was another new high-water mark, one which shot her into the upper echelons of fame.
The Wicked: For Good press tour became a must-follow, not just for fans of the film but for a meme-hungry internet, which feasted on any interview where Erivo and Grande were paired together. Erivo and Grande sat cheek by jowl; they hugged, cried, and – famously – “held space” for each other while holding each other’s index fingers in micro embrace. Erivo says she has seen most of the gifs and loves many. But there was a point at which it seemed to tip into something else, something darker.
Commentators started to ask why the pair were apparently so close. Was it all faked as part of a Hollywood psyop? What was really going on here between Erivo – a queer star – and Grande? “It was interesting that there were many people who had become psychologists from their couches,” says Erivo. “There was this weird sort of, what’s the word I’m looking for … annoyance … at the fact that two women could actually be friends. Like, why are they friends? Why are they connected? There must be something wrong with them.”
She leans forward and takes off her glasses, before beginning to sound like Tessa, the barrister. “Why are they showing emotion? How dare they cry? And how dare they laugh? And how dare they be emotive and alive?” she asks, sounding both hurt and confused. “It’s a double-edged sword,” she adds. “Because if we were dead behind the eyes and showing no emotion, there would have been something else to say about it. I wish there was someone who could have been like, ‘Right, this is the proper balance of emotion that you should show. Don’t show this. Don’t show that. Just this amount,’” she says, pinching her fingers together.
The speculation and online hysteria became even more heightened after an Australian prankster, Johnson Wen, jumped on to the red carpet in Singapore, grabbing Grande in an attempt to get a selfie with her. Erivo, who was by her side, immediately confronted him and put her arm around Grande. The moment was terrifying, says Erivo. “No one else was moving. We were on a carpet. We were exposed. My immediate response was: ‘Get this man away from us now.’”
The internet’s response was to give thinly veiled praise to Erivo, who was recast as Grande’s “bodyguard” – something she took exception to, arguing that her “humanity had been bastardised” after the incident. Today, Erivo says the reaction was one cloaked in a mix of misogyny and misogynoir – with people seemingly taking great joy in mocking a queer, muscular, bald, Black woman looking out for her friend. Erivo was asked by a journalist on another red carpet whether she was a “protector”, a question that still rankles. “I was like: ‘Oh, you think because I look like this that you could talk to me this way about something that was a human thing that I would have done for any friend, and hopefully a friend would have done for me,’” she says. “But I must be a bodyguard.
“I think the idea that it’s OK to rip a person to shreds in that way when they’re doing something that’s a naturally human thing to do just felt crazy,” she says. People in the public eye are supposed to just take abuse, she continues. “I think that this particular moment went just too far.”
I wonder if that experience made Erivo reconsider her career. She has often talked about wanting to push the limits of what’s possible – does she still feel that way? She reverts to her Tessa barrister mode, firing rhetorical questions like darts. “What else have I not discovered about myself as a person, as an artist, as a friend? Like what can I do? If I’m working towards what could be a possible limit, then it means I’m never doing the same thing over and over again. In order to push a limit, it’s gonna hurt a little bit. It’s gonna feel uncomfortable, which means I’m never staying the same. I’m always having to build.” To this very average human, that sounds exhausting, but for Erivo, perhaps it’s nothing a few Ruffles can’t fix.
