“I always think of awards like this as things that come at the end of a career, and I think I’m not even in the middle of mine,” Cynthia Erivo said on Thursday night, to loud applause, while accepting the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film at a black-tie gala to raise funds for the fest’s educational initiatives.
The actress/singer, who looks likely to land a best actress Oscar nom for the second year in a row for portraying Elphaba, aka the Wicked Witch of the West, in a Wicked film — this time Wicked: For Good, the Universal blockbuster — continued, “I thank you for this because it reminds me yes, of how far I’ve come, but also of how much more I have to go. And this is a beautiful pit stop on the way.”
The actress, who spent most of the evening at a table in the center of the Ritz-Carlton Bacara’s ballroom, sandwiched between Wicked: For Good director Jon M. Chu and producer Marc Platt, beamed as SBIFF executive director Roger Durling opened the ceremony by describing her as “one of the most incandescent lights working today.” Invoking the legendary namesake of the award that Erivo was there to receive, who died in 2020 at 103, Durling added, “Kirk would have had a great laugh and a dry martini with Ms. Erivo.”
Then unspooled a truly awesome montage of Erivo’s performances in film and on TV — assembled by the fest’s Mike McGee — which was all the more striking upon the realization that her entire screen career dates back only a decade.
It began in the aftermath of her unforgettable Tony-winning turn in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, and has included Widows; Bad Times at the El Royale; Harriet, for which she received Oscar noms for acting and songwriting (only Barbra Streisand, Lady Gaga and Mary J. Blige have also garnered both for a single film); Genius: Aretha, for which she received an Emmy nom; Luther: The Fallen Son; Pinocchio; Poker Face, in one episode of which she played five different characters, resulting in another Emmy nom; and, of course, Wicked and Wicked: For Good.
She has now been nominated for Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tonys, and has won one of each except for an Oscar. Durling declared, “We need to get on that.”
Platt, who produced both the Broadway and film incarnations of Wicked, later took the stage and said, “Thank Oz for Cynthia Erivo.” He hailed her insistence on Elphaba being portrayed with dignity; her fearlessness in performing songs not only live but also often while “flying”; and her equally powerful work in scenes that did not call on her to use her magical voice: “It’s really in the silent moments where her true superpower is revealed. It’s the moments where, with her body, or when her eyes bore into the camera and into us, that we feel her soul, we feel her emotion, her hurt, her want, her hope, and her love. It’s in these moments of silence where the essential truth of the character is revealed. And that — finding the essential truth — is the essence of great acting.”
Later, Chu touted her as “someone who knows what it means to feel unheard, and refuses to let anyone else feel that way on her watch.” He asserted, “This is my sister, my defiant, brilliant, badass witch — but she’s not ‘mine,’ she belongs to herself. I am only the witness, with a very expensive camera. I’m the one allowed to capture her butterflies and show you what I found. We are blessed — truly, truly blessed — to live in the generation that gets to experience Cynthia Erivo freshly unearthed.”
After Chu handed Erivo her award, she said, in barely a whisper, “To stand in front of you is to be reminded that there is so much work to be done. This award is a battery that powers the curiosity to carry on, to continue to excavate what it is to live, to tunnel into the depths and to fly up to the peaks of humanity.” She added, “It is a challenge to keep finding the voices that open us up to who we are and how we want to live. It is a challenge to be unafraid in my choices, to search for the lightest of beings and the darkest of hearts and those that exist inbetween, the ones who reflect us back to us. You see, I love my job.”
