Are Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande Singing Live in Wicked? Here’s How

• Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande sang live on set playing Elphaba and Glinda in Wicked
• Director Jon M. Chu wanted live rather than pre-recorded vocals in order to immerse the movie audience
• The stars have explained how they pulled off belting challenging songs while doing stunts

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s vocals soar in the new Wicked movie.

While audiences may assume the strenuousness of Elphaba’s “Defying Gravity” or Glinda’s “Popular” might necessitate lip-syncing to a studio-recorded track, Erivo, 37, and Grande, 31, elected to sing live on the set of Jon M. Chu–directed adaptation of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s hit musical about the witches of Oz. 

Chu, 45, confirmed that fact in an interview with Vanity Fair back in March. “When we were shooting it, those girls were like, ‘F— the pre-records. We’re going live.’ ” When he expressed skepticism, he recalled, the actresses assured him they were up to the task: “Yeah. That’s what we do.”

“It was an immediate no-brainer,” said Grande in a behind-the-scenes featurette posted by the movie’s YouTube page. “We both were like, ‘Well, of course, we’re singing live.’ ”

“We chose to sing live because it meant that we would be further connected to the words we were saying, and to each other,” said Erivo in the featurette. “There’s something special about what happens when music is live in a room. … It feels really powerful.”

Chu, calling the stars’ vocals on set “the best concert you could have ever attended [from] the best seats in the house,” said his team wanted to make the two-part Wicked adaptation as immersive as the Joe Mantello–directed stage show has been since Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth first dazzled Broadway in 2003.

“Effectively our movie set is also a recording studio,” said the filmmaker. “So that raw and real emotion that we are recording on set right now will be what you hear and experience in the theater.”

Of course, that meant that as Erivo flies above the Emerald City on Elphaba’s broomstick — a sequence of stunts she performed herself — she had to belt “Defying Gravity,” the notoriously difficult act-one finale song. 

“I was nervous,” the Harriet Oscar nominee admitted in an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “The first time, you’re like, ‘Where am I supposed to put my voice? It’s not working!’ And then you sort of find a way to concentrate, to figure it out, to focus it.”

Speaking to the hosts of The View, Erivo explained how she learned to hit high notes while zooming through the air: “In order to sing you need your breath, you need your lungs. And if you’re gonna do something big, especially like ‘Defying Gravity,’ you usually would have the ground underneath you to make the sound because that’s where the force comes from.”

With “no ground” and dangling feet, she said, “my wonderful vocal coach and my stunt director sort of worked together to help me find out where to place the support. I had to find a support within my body as opposed to using any outside influence.”

As she told Em Rusciano of The Emsolation Podcast, “When you’re corseted and harnessed, there’s no space for breathing.” Joked Grande: “Her lungs are in her rack.”

Erivo’s vocal coach “reset me so I could find the ground in the air, almost,” she explained. “I’d use my core and use that to make sure the sound could come out. 

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Grande similarly did not use a stunt double for Glinda’s wildest antics in Wicked. “I’m literally never going to forget you jumping on a chandelier over my head whilst singing,” Erivo told her costar while speaking to Vanity Fair. 

Despite contracting COVID the week before filming “Popular,” Grande performed that stunt and more during her character’s bubbly song. Fans of Chenoweth’s version on the Broadway record are sure to notice a significant change: Grande prances down a hallway in Shiz University, modulating Glinda’s “la la la”s up in an extended ending to the song. 

«We didn’t know if we were going to do that long ending with the key changes until we saw the hallway at Shiz,» the «Yes, And?» singer said on The Emsolation Podcast. Choreographer Chris Scott “just choreographed it and spontaneously taught me two days before we shot it.”

“We were given permission to just shift and change” some musical notes, said Erivo, to make their performances their own. “We both knew that we didn’t want to be laborious about things. We really took care of what had come before, we trust in it. The music is really beautiful.”

Wicked: Part One is in theaters Nov. 22, with Part Two slated for Nov. 26, 2025. Adapted by Holzman and Dana Fox, it also stars Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard, Marissa Bode as Nessarose, Bowen Yang as Pfannee, Bronwyn James as ShenShen, Ethan Slater as Boq, Peter Dinklage as the voice of Dr. Dillamond, and Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible.

Of taking on her first movie musical, Yeoh, 62, recalled Chu assuring her that singing as Morrible would be doable. “I was terrified! I was not just nervous,” the Oscar winner told The Hollywood Reporter. But music supervisor Dominick Amendum set her up with a vocal coach, she added, who helped her “to enjoy the process of opening up your voice.”

Go behind the scenes of Wicked with PEOPLE’s special issue, available here.