Wicked: For Good’s Bethany Weaver: ‘Since playing Dorothy, life has been a tornado of really wonderful things’

You can make a big impact, even from the shadows.

This is what Bethany Weaver has learnt from her involvement in Jon M Chu’s mega big-screen adaptation of Wicked.

Faceless and wordless, Weaver joins the lineage of wonderful performers who have played The Wizard of Oz’s heroine, Dorothy. The ambiguity of how Wicked would portray the young girl blown into Oz by a tragic tornado was a cause of much speculation, with Weaver’s identity only revealed after the release of Wicked: For Good. 

“I’ve had to wait patiently… but I feel by keeping quiet in the shadows, I’ve made a really big impact, and I’ve brought quite a lot of presence without saying a word,” she says, “It’s a big life lesson. Patience is a virtue.”

There are many life lessons to be learned from the world of Oz: “It has these wonderful undertones of hope and love, courage and bravery, and standing up for what’s right,” Weaver starts. She never expected to star in a feature film, no less one of such magnitude, and also happened to be released on her 30th birthday, but the stars aligned for the performer. Like Dorothy’s journey down the yellow brick road, she remarks: “Sometimes it’s okay if it takes you a little longer to get to where you want to go.”

Between booking the role and getting on set, Weaver re-watched The Wizard of Oz “with a playful eye,” to study the great Judy Garland: “I really wanted to honour her little mannerisms”. As a dancer, choreographer and pilates instructor (“My years of training live within like fragments of my DNA”), her goal was to create little Dorothy-isms that honour the character and who she is as a person. “When Dorothy’s scared, she’ll drop her chin down and her eyes look up a bit further, which is very innocent, like a young teenager or even a child. When she’s nervous, she kind of squeezes her fingers,” she demonstrates. “…She has lots of really endearing qualities and mannerisms that she uses when she meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and also the Lion. The finer details are the cherry on top of your performance as such… In all of my scenes, Jon [M Chu] gave me a lot of freedom and a lot of room to just play and react.”

Exploring and bearing witness to the dynamics between these iconic characters and their situations, you could picture them acting in today’s society. “… The world’s a scary place and increasingly so. I think the world actually needed Wicked more than ever for that light and hope that there are still good, brave, wonderful people out there.”

She continues to talk about Dorothy, working from the shadows, while Elphaba is forced to hide, and Glinda is thrust forward as a public figure: “Glinda demonstrates so much courage and bravery from a space that has so many pairs of eyes and opinions and facts looking at her.”

It’s why it was so important that Dorothy was played by a real person – not shadow illusions like the stage show, or CGI, but someone reacting to their new surroundings. And Weaver herself felt like the young girl landing in Oz. Putting on the Paul Tazewell-designed homage to the blue gingham dress with the puffed white sleeves, had her feeling “like I had stepped through my dishevelled house door into Oz and it was as if I was really there,” she says. “Everything that you see of me in Wicked, I’m just reacting to the wonderful actors around me and the beautifully put together set and the environment.”

From the texture on the roofs of the Munchkin’s houses to the shades of yellow on bricks, to the parasol sheltering Dorothy from the sun, Weaver smiles, “It was just all so well curated and cared for,” throughout our video call she reiterates how “lucky” she is to be gifted the role of a lifetime – but it’s clear that it isn’t simply all luck, but rather a calling to her kind-hearted, caring nature, her goodness.

She worked closely with Jonathan Bailey and recalls being fascinated after “seeing the texture and the little bits of straw popping out of his face.” She described it as “almost replicating stubble from a real man, and with Ethan [Slater]’s little nose and all of the detail in his ears, it was amazing.”

Weaver says she is terrible in big crowds and with loud noises. It was a fear she was forced to swallow while filming “March of the Witch Hunters”, where Dorothy leads that big, loud crowd. “There were hundreds of people on set. There was fire. Someone was doing a war cry. The playback music was really loud. The fountain was whirring,” she paints the picture of her time on set, relieved she was carrying Oscar (her Toto), who, “in that moment, was an emotional support dog,” with his paw holding her hand.

What’s striking is how she remembers the emotions of the day of filming. She recalls crowding around the Tin Man, played by Slater, and “feeling an intense level of guilt.”

She explains a little shyly: “You can’t see my face in that shot, but I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I have led these people into this kind of space of anger and animosity and encouraged them to behave this way.'” She found herself wondering if Dorothy could have calmed him down or helped him, and credits Slater’s performance for her immersion there.

Although there are no spoken words from Dorothy, we can still hear her. Wicked: For Good features a birdseye view shot of Dorothy’s legs and feet as a flying monkey takes her. There was no stunt double or trickery, Weaver laughs, explaining: “I had this wonderful gentleman just pulling me up in the air, and Jon was like, ‘Oh, can you be a bit more frantic?'”

She asked if she had permission to scream (“I don’t know why, I hadn’t screamed since I was eight!”) and fully committed. “They pulled me up in the air, and I had this big fan going behind me, and I just let out this enormous scream.” As we chat, she’s sitting in her serene Surrey pilates studio, and it feels almost at odds with the stories she’s sharing as she remembers that it was the end of the day of a long shoot, but it apparently did wonders in waking everybody back up.

Weaver couldn’t be more complimentary of the fans of Oz (“I adore them – they’re very unique, they’re very clever, they’re very dedicated”), many of whom have thanked her for bringing Dorothy back onto the screen and into their lives. “I’ve only come to realise since the film came out, and I’ve been able to share who I am, exactly what Dorothy represents – love and hope and light for everybody, whether that’s a six-year-old child who goes to a dance class or a friend of Dorothy who’s maybe 65 and living in LA. Even teenagers are expressing how much it’s impacted them seeing Dorothy and these young women in the amazing Land of Oz.”

“Carrying that essence of Judy Garland and all of the wonderful Dorothy’s before me, in my heart and on my shoulders, I can’t begin to describe how honourable that is.”

Toto, too, represents more than being a furry sidekick. In Wicked: For Good, it is the first time the dog is seen on a leash, and fans were quick to speculate why. “I love how they tied it to the relationship between Dorothy and Elphaba and how, through the lens of Elphaba, she sees a dog on a leash, and she sees an animal having their voice taken away, an animal being controlled and silenced and manipulated.” In reality, it was for safety reasons as the yellow brick road was close to a large body of water.

But the environment and creative choices all mirror today’s world. “It’s all in the finer details,” Weaver says of her performance and of the creation of the film, “They made it a real place.” Having trained at Laine Theatre Arts and Urdang Academy, she says, “This was the first job that I’ve done where I just let all of that go and just reacted to what was in front of me. Although I don’t have any dialogue, [Dorothy is] probably for me the best performance I’ve given. As an actor and a performer and an artist and a creative, sometimes you just have to really immerse yourself in the moment, and that’s where wonderful things are born. Everyone brought really interesting, authentic choices.

“We were very lucky that Jon created that atmosphere. The leaders of our industry, the best ones, give you the right atmosphere to thrive in.”