Wicked author Gregory Maguire on the real meaning of the story that captivated the world

Before it was a Hollywood blockbuster, it was a mega-hit musical, and before that it was a 1995 novel. Author Gregory Maguire tells the BBC about the inspiration behind Wicked.

When author Gregory Maguire was a child, he and his siblings regularly acted out scenes from the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. They would even change the story and its perspectives, just to keep themselves entertained. “The material was so malleable that you could change it and it would still be recognisable,” Maguire told the BBC. Little did he know that these childhood games would one day lead to his life-changing novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West.

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the plot of Wicked.

In the early 1990s, Maguire was a well-respected children’s author who had received “good reviews but no big sales”, he says. After working as a professor at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature in Boston and then co-founding the non-profit charity Children’s Literature New England, Maguire wanted to try writing for adults. “I thought I had to throw everything I cared about into this book, because I never wanted to write another one,” he says.

Maguire knew that the theme he wanted to explore in the novel was the nature of evil. Specifically, what does it mean to be “evil”? Are we just characterizing certain types of behavior? Do we judge the decay and corruption of someone’s moral fiber? Maguire knew that if he was going to win readers over, he would have to weave the subject into “an arresting plot that would engage hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” he says.

That’s when Maguire thought back to The Wizard of Oz. Especially Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West and her cards interactions with Glinda, played by Billie Burke, towards the start of the Victor Fleming film. “I thought to myself, ‘They know each other. They’ve crossed paths before. They went to school together!'” Creating this scenario in his head provoked Maguire to laugh out loud. “I thought it was so funny. Because it was such a good idea.”

Maguire’s assumption turned out to be correct. Wicked’s revisionist exploration of both L Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the 1939 film adaptation take a comprehensive look at the life of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire named her Elphaba, a play on the initials of the original author. In the book we see the reasons why Elphaba is considered evil as societal perceptions and circumstances force her to act in ways that are considered villainous.

Born with green skin, she is regularly pointed at and laughed at. This prejudice makes her feel so much like an outcast that she ostracizes herself from other people. After discovering that the land’s sentient, talking animals are being locked up, Elphaba turns to Oz for help. But Oz dismisses her concerns as he wants the people to unite in the belief that the talking animals are their common enemy. Elphaba goes into hiding and joins an underground group to try to protect the animals. Oz then uses propaganda to tell the rest of the country that Elphaba is evil, even though she fights for justice and to protect the vulnerable. She then reacts with righteous rage at her sister’s death, and Glinda gives away her family’s shoes to Dorothy.

Although it wasn’t a bestseller when it came out in 1995, the book was a word-of-mouth hit, says Maguire. “Every year it would sell more than the year before. It was the true definition of a sleeper hit.” Stephen Schwartz’s decision to adapt the book into a musical made it even more popular. The musical version of Elphaba is more misunderstood and kinder than the increasingly dark and bitter version in the book. Wicked has been playing in New York since October 30, 2003, making it the fourth longest running Broadway show of all time.

Such success meant that a Hollywood adaptation was inevitable. But like the musical, Wicked the film (part one) deviates from the book in several ways, perhaps to make it more accessible to mainstream audiences. Instead of being entirely Elphaba’s (Cynthia Erivo) story, we also see Glinda’s (Ariana Grande) perspective as the story revolves much more around their friendship. The film takes place at Shiz University in the Land of Oz, where Elphaba and Glinda are forced to share a room. While they begin to hate each other, they quickly become friends, and they both fall for the same handsome prince (Jonathan Bailey). But as they continue their studies, they discover the sinister plot unfolding in the Land Of Oz, forcing the land’s talking animals to go into hiding.

Dana Fox, who co-wrote the film Winnie Holzmansays that part of Wicked’s success is due to how Maguire twisted audience expectations. Before the book, everyone would insist, “The Green Witch is evil. We all know she’s bad. But if you ask a person why she’s evil, they can’t answer,” Fox told the BBC. “The genius of Maguire’s book is that he interrogated that very question.”

While Maguire was considering these themes and his potential story for Wicked, an incident occurred that caused him to think more deeply about the nature of evil. February 12, 1993 turned two years old James Bulger was murdered by two 10-year-olds in Merseyside, England. As Maguire watched reports of this tragedy unfold on television, people on programs and over dinner would discuss the terrible crime these boys had committed. It prompted Maguire, who was living in London at the time, to wonder: “Where did the decision to do what they did come from? Where did that capacity for evil come from?” As the murder continued to be analyzed and intellectual discussions continued about whether “sociological, biochemical or spiritual causes were to blame,” Maguire says, he realized that the cruelty fed into “everything he had considered” about Wicked. “That sad, sad event turned out to be a catalyst for me to push forward,” says Maguire.

Shortly after the book was published, Maguire learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike had quoted from it in an essay he wrote on the subject of evil, he says. “The one line he quoted from Wicked in the article that sums it all up is, ‘It is the nature of evil to be secret.'” In a 406-page novel, he had found the one sentence that was the most coherent and comprehensive conclusion, I had left.”

Maguire insists he never came up with a “unified theory” of evil. He believes that self-loathing is an element, as “the biological imperative to survive and not harm ourselves is so strong that if we hate ourselves enough, we stab the world instead of ourselves”. The best summary he ever read of evil was written by Graham Greene in his novel The Power and the Glory. “He wrote that most evil is simply a failure of imagination.” Greene wrote about how fascism arises “because people can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone else,” Maguire says. In Wicked, Maguire shows the Wizard using populism and propaganda to keep control of Oz, weaponizing these tools against animals who are different and Elphaba because she disagrees with him.

For Fox, Wicked remains relevant because “certain people are still different in our society or made to be the bad guys so other people can get power”. And Wicked’s continuing resonance centers on Elphaba’s narrative as she moves from feeling like she doesn’t belong and doesn’t want green skin towards self-acceptance and self-love. “You don’t have to have green skin to know how it feels. Everyone has felt this way about themselves in life,” says Fox. “There’s a little Elphaba inside all of us. There’s a little Glinda inside all of us. Empathizing so deeply with these characters is why people have loved this show and this story for so long.”

Wicked is released in the UK and US on November 22.