Interview: Ethan Slater Discusses His ‘Wicked: For Good’ Transformation and Making the Iconic Character His Own

In Wicked: For Good, we see Ethan Slater’s Boq transformed by Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo) into the Tin Man, changing the character forever and bringing The Wizard of Oz connection full circle. The movie itself serves as the epic conclusion to the untold story of the witches of Oz, which comes after last year’s Wicked, the most successful Broadway film adaptation of all time.

Between the musical stage play, the bestselling novel by Gregory Maguire, and the 1939 movie, there were plenty of different sources of inspiration for the actor to turn to when it came to his well-known character. So what was his approach? “I think that it comes down to taking in all of the research and making sure that I’ve consumed it and I’ve taken it in, and I see what I love and then, not trying to replicate it because the only way to make something honest and truthful is to be it,” he shared. “Otherwise, you’re doing a caricature, you’re doing a performance of somebody else’s performance. So for me, as the Tin Man, there were these little physical things that the jolly Tin Man does in The Wizard of Oz that I wanted to allude to physically, the tilting, the sort of joints and things, but I also wanted him to be angrier and clunkier, and a little even less comfortable in his body in some ways.”

He continued to explain, “I took some of these movements, and I sort of crafted a way of walking, and that came mostly from me starting with the movements and the inspiration. And then, when it comes to the stage versions of Boq, I mean, they’re brilliant, they’re amazing, and not only are they amazing, but Chris Fitzgerald and everybody who played Boq in the workshops leading up to it being on Broadway and in San Francisco, they affected the script. So those performances are in the script, and now I get to draw inspiration, not only from their performances, but from the work that Winnie [Holzman] and Stephen [Schwartz] captured of their performances, and then I get to sort of, again, try to make it my own.”

While all of our main characters are changed in one way or another by the end, Boq’s is impossible to ignore due to its physical nature. However, that transition originally started as an internal one, so the scene had a lot to represent for his overall arc.

“I think the turn from confusion to anger [was most important]. I think anger can feel really one-note sometimes, and what I really wanted from Boq in that moment was to capture how disoriented he is, and how being disoriented can lead you to reacting in a way that you might not otherwise do. So yeah, I think that he has a lot of sort of misplaced anger, and one of the things that I’ve been talking about is that the transformation starts way before the magic happens,” Slater expressed. “He feels stuck, and in that first scene, he tries to do the right thing for himself and, honestly, for Nessa, and get out, and when she turns the state on him in order to keep him there, he’s kind of gone, right? He’s lost it, and he makes these efforts. He’s like, ‘I’m gonna go, I need to go now that you can be happy because you have magic, I need to go again.’ But he’s already kind of lost himself there. He’s already unable to recognize himself, and he doesn’t recognize the Elphaba that he once knew, and he doesn’t recognize the Nessa that he once knew. It’s already sort of gone, and so I just wanted to take that to its magical extreme in that moment.”

Watch Awards Radar’s full video interview with Slater (below), where we talked about “March of the Witch Hunters,” Boq’s journey to find his heart again, how using prosthetics helped him connect with what his character was going through, why the themes of Wicked will always be relevant, and more.

Wicked: For Good is now playing in theaters.