‘Wicked’ Writer Gregory Maguire Says Movie Is ‘Far Better Than It Has Any Right To Be’

Evil broke several box office records in its opening weekend and grossed $165 million worldwide as fans across the globe packed theaters to see the story come to life on the big screen.

For Gregory Maguire, the book’s author Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the Weston which the film was based, is a far cry from the Oz he first dreamed up nearly three decades ago.

“It’s way better than it has any right to be,” Maguire said of the film, which stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande as young Glinda the Good Witch, with Jonathan Bailey, as Fiyero, caught between them in a love triangle.

Now Maguire’s story captivates a new generation with the two-part film adaptation, the second of which is scheduled for release in November 2025.

But by 1994 he was broke, living in a cramped flat in London and unsure of his future.

“I was what the British call ‘financial embarrassment,'” Maguire told Yahoo Entertainment. Due to the conditions of his visa, he was unable to work legally and his only option was to write. He recalled his roommate making a suggestion: “She said, ‘Gregory, I have a great idea. Why don’t you just write a bestseller?'”

At the time, Maguire had written several children’s books, but none had made much of it. He was happy to tackle broader themes such as pain, tragedy and how society’s expectations shape who we are.

What started as a modest idea – retelling of the backstory of L. Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — turned into an unexpected phenomenon. Released in 1995, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West not only became a bestseller, but was adapted into a hit Broadway musical that has become one of the longest-running shows in history, earning a estimated $5 billion in worldwide ticket sales since opening in 2003.

Looking back, Maguire said his roommate’s advice almost feels prophetic.

“I didn’t write Evil to make myself rich,” he explained. “The truth is, I was 39 and thought, ‘OK, you’d better write this before somebody else does, because it’s a good idea’.”

‘Are people born evil?’

In the musical version ofEvilGlinda poses a question to the audience: “Are men born wicked, or have evil wrought upon them?”

It’s a question that haunted Maguire murdered in 1993 by 2-year-old James Bulger of two young boys in Britain, who inspired the central theme of Evil.

“How do two 10-year-olds wake up in the morning and become murderers in the evening?” he asked himself then. There were theories – a fatherless home, bullying siblings – but none felt sufficient to Maguire. He took a similar approach when creating the Elphaba character.

Elphaba’s backstory is tragic: rejected by her father because of her green skin and forced to confront her mother’s death. “I wanted to put a lot of different concepts and theories of evil on the page without drawing a conclusion about it,” said Maguire, who discovered personal parallels in Elphaba’s story.

“I was raised Catholic, I’m a gay man, I was the middle child of seven, my mother died when I was born. All of them make me,” he explained. “In the same way, all the things that happened to Elphaba, part of why she becomes the way she becomes — but it’s not just one thing.”

In writing the novel, Maguire wanted readers to form their own judgments about Elphaba as she struggles with unspoken questions about her identity and beliefs. Her resolve is tested when she refuses to join the Wizard of Oz’s oppressive regime, prompting his propaganda machine to unfairly label her “evil” and subject her to unfair persecution.

An unlikely friendship with Glinda, her popular but insecure classmate, forces Elphaba to ask herself: Am I really evil, or has the world decided to make me this way?

Nearly three decades since the book was published, Maguire doesn’t know the answer.

“I still don’t know what evil is,” he said. “What I do know is that a human being who commits an evil act suffers from an enormous amount of self-hatred. Evil behavior, I believe, is only possible when we cannot extend empathy to other people—or even ourselves. “

Maguire acknowledges that both the Broadway musical and the film took creative liberties with his original vision. In her novel, Elphaba was conceived in the style of Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch in the 1939s The Wizard of Oz.

“I hardly recognize it as my book anymore,” he said. “(The novel’s Elphaba) is sharp and headstrong and powerful. In the film, Cynthia Erivo is also sharp, headstrong and powerful, but she’s also lovely, and it’s a very interesting conundrum. I look at her performance in awe and think, “How could you pull that off?”

The boys from Oz

When Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, the United States struggled with industrial innovation and territorial expansion.

Maguire sees Baum’s Oz—with its characters traveling through unknown lands and meeting others who look and act differently—as a metaphor for America’s struggles with growth, displacement, and otherness in the early 20th century, particularly as it relates to stealing Native American lands.

Maguire said he deliberately infused these themes into his own vision, using Oz as a reflection of America’s challenges and a cautionary tale about repeating the past.

“I wanted cultures in Oz to not understand each other, to be racist and hegemonic and responsible for the ways in which their society doesn’t work,” he explained. “That way, I wanted it to represent the United States somewhere between 1900 and 1930.”

Maguire has published four sequels to the original novel and a prequel, Elphiewhich will be published in 2025. Evil continues to evolve and Oz remains a world of contradictions. At the same time, Maguire said, it is a place of imagination, resilience and an abiding hope for something better over the rainbow.

“I’m laying down the world as I understood it,” Maguire said. “Perhaps I subconsciously understood that bad things that have put us in danger in the past will always be dangerous.”

Update, November 25, 2024: This story was originally published on November 18, 2024 and has been updated with this weekend’s box office numbers.