‘Wicked’ Director Jon M. Chu on These Cameos: ‘We Had One Day’

(The following story contains major spoilers for Evil.)

A short day. It is random how much time Evil filmmakers had to shoot you cameos for the “One Short Day” scene in the film based on the iconic Broadway musical of the same name.

In the film, when Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) go to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), they see a stage show about the history of Oz. Meanwhile, original Broadway cast members Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, who played Glinda and Elphaba, respectively, in the musical appear to take the audience through the town’s vibrant history.

“There was no world where we wouldn’t invite them to come and be a part of this,” says director Jon M. Chu The Hollywood Reporter. “The question for us was how and how much are they willing to put into it, and how much can the story itself handle it? Because they’re such iconic people and especially for these roles.”

He continues: “It was like a mania. (We said), ‘Let’s make them the biggest stars in Oz. Let’s turn them into these iconic legends of Oz on the stage show and let them present the history of Oz. They would be the wise women of Oz.’ It just seemed to make sense. And (composer) Steven Schwartz — it might actually have come from him from my memory — said, “I know exactly how to do that,” because we needed some information about the story of the story of Oz, plus that would be them , so it would be more meaningful.”

Chu explains that they only had one day to film this sequence after sneaking Menzel and Chenoweth into London. “We had a night in the middle of the night, from 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., on a rainy night. … the moment they sang the songs and had their iconic moments in it, it was beautiful. And what was cool about the day , was, I think, really healing for everybody. … I said, ‘This is in honor of you. This whole thing of making this movie is in honor of you, because we want you to experience, what we got to experience when we first saw it when i went to the theater before it went on broadway, what it felt like to see elphaba and glinda steal our hearts, you’ve never experienced that and now we’re going to do it for you.’ Ari cries all the time. There was a lot of love on that day. So I’m so grateful that they come out. I had no idea what it took to get them there. All I knew was that they were down and willing. We only had one day to do it.”

Two other cameos appear in the sequence. Winnie Holzman, who wrote the book about the musical Evilappears as a resident of Emerald City. Schwartz appears at the palace and announces “The wizard wants to see you now!”

Evilwhich opened in theaters on Friday via Universal Pictures, stars Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, Marissa Bode as Nessarose, Keala Settle as Miss Coddle and Bowen Yang as Pfannee.

You can read Chu’s full interview about Evil here.