Actor Cynthia Erivo on Ariana Grande, becoming a queer icon and turning down Westlife

Since it opened in the West End of London, in 2022, Prima Facie has won widespread critical acclaim and numerous prizes, including Olivier Awards for best new play and best actress, and a Tony Award for Jodie Comer’s performance on Broadway.

Written by a former human-rights and criminal-defence lawyer, Suzie Miller, the one-woman play has sold out runs in London and New York and become the most-watched production so far in the UK National Theatre’s series of live broadcasts.

Its impact has extended well beyond theatre, helping to change judicial guidance on the evidence juries can consider in rape trials: a senior judge contacted Miller to say they had rewritten parts of their directions for juries in rape trials, noting, as the play does, that a victim may not remember an assault in a clear, chronological sequence and that freezing during an assault is a recognised response and does not imply consent.

One famous Londoner missed Prima Facie completely, however.

“Many things were happening at the same time,” Cynthia Erivo says.

Well, quite. While Comer was performing the play on stage, Erivo was filming Wicked – and becoming one of the most photographed women in the world.

Every associated action she took was scrutinised, sensationalised and occasionally vilified, from “making space” for Ariana Grande, her Wicked costar, to blocking a man who jumped a barricade and rushed towards Grande on the “yellow carpet” – Grande had been left with post-traumatic stress disorder after a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a concert she gave in Manchester in 2017.

Relentless speculation and commentary about their weight and changing appearances culminated in Grande’s “stepping back” from public-facing work last September.

“We were holding on by threads,” Erivo says of the past four years. “And we were trying to take care of each other.”

Promoting the new film version of Prima Facie, in which Erivo steps into the gruelling central role, is a very different business – save for glamming up for the London premiere.

“Getting dressed up never gets old,” Erivo says. “But the part that is really beautiful is that we get to share it for the first time. I love that.”

The story, which Miller has adapted for the screen herself, centres on Tessa, a glamorous rising junior barrister in London who has made a name for herself as an effective defender of men accused of sexual assault. Her thought processes during cross-examination suggest she has the instincts of a keen hunter.

But her faith in justice and in her profession is torpedoed when she is sexually assaulted by Julian (Daniel Ings), her colleague and boyfriend.

When she reports her rape to the police, a traumatised Tessa hopes her legal background will allow her to swerve the pitfalls she herself has lured accusers and witnesses into. Inevitably, she faces a grilling in which the expensive lingerie she bought in advance of the fateful date is given more consideration than the nuances of consent.

The film is Erivo’s first post-Wicked release. For the actor, it was a no-brainer.

“I had heard about the play,” she says. “And I had heard about Jodie’s performance. I knew it was brilliant. I also knew about the subject matter. So then the film came, and I really didn’t take very much time to say yes. I had read Suzie’s work, and I could see that this was an important thing to be a part of.”

[ The Irish Times Women’s Podcast: Suzie Miller, the woman behind Prima Facie, the sell-out play starring Jodie ComerOpens in new window ]

Miller and the film’s director, Susanna White, faced a significant challenge in expanding a one-woman show to fill a cinema screen. White, whose credits include the TV series Generation Kill and Andor, has been working on the adaptation for five years. She was an early adopter.

“Suzie sent me an early draft, so that was even before Jodie had signed up,” she says. “Since then it’s been a play in over 50 countries, with over 100 actresses playing Tessa, and has become this global phenomenon.

“My relationship with the play really is about the relationship with the ideas. I had very little to do with the play because Susie had already started the process of adapting. What I did was say, ‘Well, there’s a lot of dialogue you’re putting here, and actually cinema doesn’t need very much.’ And that was a fantastic collaboration, turning it into another form.”

White spent months shadowing barristers, observing juries and studying the way rape cases are handled. She then brought real-world professionals into the production, casting two serving officers in the police-statement scenes and a doctor and nurse with a background working with sexual-assault survivors in the clinic scenes.

“I spent a lot of time going to court and watching barristers,” White says. “I wanted this to feel truthful – not to be cliched but actually what it means to be a barrister. What does winning a case mean to them? Very often they’re on to the next thing, aren’t they? Whereas for the person being accused, they’re likely to be changed forever by that moment.”

Erivo, similarly, spent time at the Old Bailey – the central criminal court of England and Wales – and consulted barristers. That’s no surprise. For Wicked, the actor trained for months to perform her own stunts; she also sang while running on a treadmill to build the stamina she needed to deliver her vocals while airborne.

Perhaps inevitably, the Tony Award-winning star of The Color Purple tapped into the musicality of the dock.

“It was really helpful to sit and watch cases, just to watch a court case happen, because there’s this particular kind of tune that one particular barrister was using,” Erivo says. “I remember thinking that I might employ this exact tune if I was in court.

“And speaking to barristers was amazing. One, named Lauren, was so good at explaining her day to day and what she wears. She wears one good ring. Stud earrings, never hoops. Just those tiny little pieces of detail that allow people to believe in what you are doing.”

When you meet Erivo it can be hard to reconcile her tiny-voiced, petit presence with her huge performance of Defying Gravity in Wicked or the steely determination that has otherwise powered her career. No other actor can claim to have run the London Marathon in three hours 35 minutes and immediately returned to West End stage for a one-woman version of Dracula, in which she played all 23 characters, delivering about 20,000 words of dialogue.

A Catholic girl who became a queer icon, Erivo is a fighter. This daughter of Nigerian immigrants was an outsider at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a painful experience she chronicled in her memoir, Simply More: A Book for Anyone Who Has Been Told They’re Too Much.

Working three jobs to support herself through college, she had to turn down a two-week backing-singer gig with Westlife that would have paid £10,000 – about €22,000 today, and enough to cover years of tuition – because Rada officials refused to allow her to miss college for it.

Other students were granted permission for similar opportunities, she says. During a Rada production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, when two stars became ill (one with laryngitis, one with food poisoning), Erivo was asked to sing from behind the scenes while other actors mimed on stage.

She quickly found work in musical theatre, landing roles in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the touring production of Sister Act. But it was her role as Celie, the young protagonist of The Color Purple, musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel, who survives abuse and fights for independence, that catapulted Erivo into the limelight.

When the West End production transferred to Broadway, in 2015, she reprised the role opposite Jennifer Hudson and Danielle Brooks, delivering a performance that earned her the Tony Award for best actress in a musical.

The movieverse soon followed. Erivo made her feature debut in the Steve McQueen film Widows, in 2018, playing a savvy single mother and beautician who is recruited as a getaway driver. Writing in the New Yorker magazine, Anthony Lane praised her vitality, noting that her character is “always sprinting to catch buses or racing between tasks.”

That kinetic energy also underpins Erivo’s role as Tessa in Prima Facie. Her barrister’s strut is a marvel – and essential for a character written for a working-class Londoner made good.

There are undeniable parallels with Erivo’s own rise.

“I felt like there’s something about Tessa,” she says. “She needed to walk through those spaces with a particular kind of confidence. And, also, there’s a want to prove that she belongs in that space. I wanted to make sure that’s how she moved, how she existed.”

Erivo’s Hollywood career got off to a blazing start with the title role in Kasi Lemmons’s film Harriet, as the abolitionist Harriet Tubman. It earned her Academy Award nominations for best actress and best original song, for Stand Up, which she co-wrote for the soundtrack.

Now the actor is on course for the Egot, as potentially one of the few people to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony; all she needs is the Academy Award to round out her set.

Erivo had her pick of projects following her Oscar-nominated turn in the $1.2 billion-grossing Wicked sequence. Her decision to plump for the potentially bruising Prima Facie required both therapy and careful collaboration with Lizzy Talbot, the film’s intimacy coordinator.

“Lizzy was very, very helpful,” Erivo says. “Not just in psychological ways but practical ways too. I had my therapist on board, which was essential. There would be days when I would feel triggered and I’d need to call someone and just talk them out.

“But actually, on set, I worked a lot with Dan [Ings]. We found a common ground. He and I were really good at working together to make sure each other felt safe. We found things that would keep us happy and keep us upbeat, and that was really special.”

[ Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s emotional love-ins take publicity to another levelOpens in new window ]

Susanna White would like her movie to have as much of an impact on the legal profession as the play did.

“I really hope it’s a film which is going to provoke conversation, that people see it in the cinema together as a shared experience, so they can come out and have a conversation,” she says.

“We’ve already seen it starting to provoke conversation within the law, and I think that’s very exciting, the idea of the law evolving from within.”

Erivo agrees.

“I don’t want us to become frustrated about the problems or to stop having conversations,” she says. “You have to keep trying until you actually achieve something.”

Prima Facie is in cinemas from Friday, November 13th