Film

Ariana Grande wishes she could ‘unsee’ graphic lesbian Wicked fan art

Feb 13
Written by Sophie Perry

Ariana Grande is Glinda in Wicked. (Universal Pictures)

Wicked star Ariana Grande has spoken about the amount of risqué Gelphie fan art she has seen since taking on the role of Glinda the Good in the hit film.

Jon M Chu’s adaption of the stage musical smashed box-office records and brought new fans into the into world of Oz… and Gelphie shipping.

The story has always resonated with LGBTQ+ people, thanks to its themes of otherness, with many fans interpreting the relationship between Glinda, played on screen by Grande, and Elphaba, as more than platonic. And that has led to large numbers of fanfics and pieces of fan art about the pair, in the 20 years since it opened on Broadway.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about “the Gelphie stuff”, Grande admitted she wished she could “unsee some things”, adding: “I had a feeling but I didn’t know it would be on this scale or this graphic.”

Gelphie shippers are certainly not without grounds for their favourite pairing, given that Gregory Maguire’s original novel, on which the musical was based, alludes to is a lesbian sub-plot involving the two witches.

During the Wicked press tour, Maguire told Them that he had “wanted to give that level of complexity to Oz” for it to be “believable”, and this “included sexual orientation and sexual diversity”.

When asked about the sapphic tension between the characters and whether he’d created it on purpose, the author replied: “That was intentional, and it was modest and restrained and refined in such a way that one could imagine that one of those two young women had felt more than the other and had not wanted to say it.

“Or perhaps because a novelist can’t write every scene, perhaps when the lights were out and the novelist was out having a smoke in the back alley, the girls had sex on the way to the Emerald City. I wanted to propose this possibility but I did not want to make a declarative statement about [it].”

And even Grande has admitted that she thinks Glinda is a little queer, telling Gay Times: “Whether it’s romantic or platonic, Glinda might be a little in the closet. You never know. Give it a little time. It is just a true love and I think that transcends sexuality. That’s probably why they ship it.”