[This story contains spoilers from Wicked: For Good.]
While Elphaba and Glinda have big character arcs in Wicked: For Good, Ethan Slater’s Boq arguably has one of the biggest transformations.
In the second film, Boq finds himself in servitude to Nessarose, the sister of Elphaba, as she has become Governor of Munchkinland. As he tries to leave, Nessarose attempts to cast a spell on him to make him stay, and Elphaba is left to fix him in the only way she knows how: making him into a tin man.
Turning Slater into the iconic Wizard of Oz character took about five hours in the chair, and involved a collaboration between the makeup, prosthetics and costume teams, as the silver elements of Nessarose’s office are shown affixing themselves to him to create his armor.Still, as makeup designer Frances Hannon, noted “The real intention was to really leave Boq to come through,” and leave his face somewhat exposed so that he could perform his emotional scenes.
The feeling of being trapped in the costume, while still seeing himself helped inform Slater’s performance. Shooting the scene where he turns into the Tin Man was his “dream day.”
“We would be in the room and we said ‘This is going to become this part of you.’ So I would fall into it. There’s a moment where my hand hits the desk and the thimbles and the pieces of what’s on her desk sort of attached to my hand, and I got to fall into those things,” Slater said. “There’s other moments that you can’t quite get as much, but falling onto the tray that wraps around. I love falling. I fall for a living. And so it was pretty fun to do that and to know what was going to happen,’ he said.
The big reveal of the Tin Man in the film comes as he axes through the door of Nessarose’s office, evoking imagery of Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!” in The Shining.
“Somewhere there is a take of me doing exactly that. I feel like that was deemed a little on the nose,” he said.
His character then goes on the offensive against Elphaba, including leading the mob of Ozians in the song, “March of the Witch Hunters.”
The first day Slater arrived in London, ahead of filming, he sat down with director Jon M. Chu and chatted for hours about Boq’s character arc, which he said is “unfortunately relatable” in the world, namely around the ways that resentment and loneliness can turn to anger. It was important for Slater to note that Boq is originally coming from a good place.
“It’s a tragic arc. It’s somebody who is looking for his place in the world, and feels like he found it in these little moments in that first movie, right? And it’s sort of misdirected in a way, from his passion for Glinda, he ends up like forming this bond in this relationship with Nessa. And then once we get to the second movie, we see how those things start to crumble and the insecurities and the feeling of being trapped in a place where you don’t recognize yourself anymore turns you into something you didn’t realize you could become,” Slater said.
Filming the “March of the Witch Hunters” number felt “terrifying,” Slater said, given the hordes of actors around him holding real flames and screaming “Kill Her.”
Sound Mixer Simon Hayes worked to amplify those feelings in the number, as he placed subwoofers on the set that played a pounding rhythm, akin to being in a techno club, and then asked the background actors, many of whom are not singers, to belt along to the beat with raw emotion. The team left that as a layer, and added chorus singers to the mix in post-production.
In the midst of the number, Slater’s character glances up toward Glinda standing on a balcony and overseeing the masses, but it’s unclear whether he actually notices her there. This is his favorite moment in the film.
“I do think that Boq looks up because he knows that she’s there. She famously lives there. But instead of being able to see her, or being able to remember this friend of his who he was deeply in love with, he’s still so fueled by his anger that all he can see is the torches in the way,” Slater said.
