Wicked Good

I recently had the incredible opportunity to sit down with Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which inspired the smash hit Broadway musical and the blockbuster two-part movie musical starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Wicked: For Good, the second film in the two-part saga, was just released in theaters on November 21, right on time for the holiday season. The full interview with Gregory will be printed in the Vermont Magazine Summer/Fall 2026 issue, but here’s a little teaser to put you in a “Wicked” good mood.

Megan: Wicked was the first adult novel you wrote after 17 years of writing only children’s books. I read that you were in London thinking about the nature of good and evil, and you decided to take the character of the Wicked Witch of the West and flesh her out, give her more of a back story, and that’s how Wicked came to be. I would love to hear more about that thought process.

Gregory: When I started to write Wicked in about 1992 or ’93, my first ambition had been to write the life story of a true sociopath or a psychopath. I wanted to write from the birth to the death of somebody akin to Stalin or Hitler; somebody with menace interlaced into their integuments and pumping through their brain, through the heartless heart that lives in their heart cavity. That was my aesthetic ambition.

I gave Elphaba a dicey inception and ugliness from infancy. I gave her the aberration of a mouthful of snake teeth and the ability to seem menacing even to the people who should have loved her the best. At about page 38, when she was about one or two, I finished a certain scene by having her crawling across the floorboards of their cottage in Munchkinland, peeing on the floor, putting down her nose to smell it, and then smiling at the smell of her own pee. I meant this to seem feral and animal-like, broken and incorrect. That was my intention when I wrote that paragraph, and then I went to bed.

The next day, I got up, got my coffee, sat down at my notebook and reread the last page or two of what I'd written the day before. I write in chronological order and build on what has come the page before— and the 100 pages before. I read that paragraph about the girl being so ferocious and so unlovely. Instead of finding the next scene in which I could make her unlovelier still, I read that scene and my heart broke.

I read it like a reader, and I said to myself, “Oh, my gosh. Oh Elphie, nobody is ever going to get you, are they? And that's your life. Not the life that I thought I was going to harness you, sabotage you, and enslave you into. You have a different life, and it's not the one I thought I'd be writing. My job is now to put aside my ambitions and do something that is going to seem much more traditional and even obvious, I'm just going to follow you in your life with my reporter's notebook and write down what I see and tell readers what I see about what happens to you. I'm not going to force you to play a role for my intellectual psychodrama. I'm going to try to let you be yourself and just be responsible.”

Some people will call it the rehabilitation of a villain, which is not exactly what I wanted. I wanted the humanization of the villain, which is not the same thing. She does lots of bad things. She's impatient, she's testy, and she's morally uncertain many times in my novel, but she's still human. She has the capacity for guilt, for remorse, and for confusion; for love and passion, courage and insight, vision and power. She's got everything that I could see in myself and that I can see in others. She led me through the whole plot. All I had to do was follow. It was really an easy job once I got going.

Megan: Were you surprised by the reaction to it?

Gregory: I had just gotten an agent, and he thought it was a great idea. He said, “We're going to be able to sell this, and it's going to do well for the first selling season, I think, and then it will subside, but it will be a permanent slow burner for many years, maybe even a couple of decades. It’s not going to be a big seller, but I’m willing to pedal it for you.” By the time the Broadway play was about to open, it had sold close to a million copies without Broadway behind it. So that was a big surprise to him, to my editors, and to me. Then Broadway happened and it went stratospheric.

Megan: And how did the Broadway show come to be?

Gregory: I started getting movie offers for Wicked within a week of its publication. That was because it had a glorious top of the fold, front page review in the Los Angeles Times book section. They called it an “instant classic.” People started calling my agent on Monday morning from Hollywood, wanting to know who has the rights, and how much they would cost. Whoopi Goldberg asked, Laurie Metcalf asked, Claire Danes asked, Demi Moore asked, and a few others. We decided to go with Demi Moore because she already had a working relationship with Universal Pictures, and the others were development companies that would have to go out and sell the project to a studio.

Universal optioned it to work for a couple of years on a script that they didn't like, and frankly, I didn't like, either. They made it into something I didn't recognize and something I didn't approve of, but I had adopted three children from overseas, and the purchase price for a film, once the film was greenlit, would have been enough to help me mostly or fully pay off my mortgage. That was important to a writer living by his wits. I was ready to plug my nose, put blindfolds on, and sign that contract, but the film studio wasn't ready to put millions of dollars into a script that they didn't think was all that powerful.

Stephen Schwartz then came upon the book about a year and a half after it was published. He was referenced to it by his friend Holly Near, the folk singer. They were snorkeling together in Hawaii, and apparently, they bumped heads underwater, both came up, took off their masks, and Holly said, “ow.” And Stephen said, “What are you reading lately?” She answered, “This great book called Wicked about the Wicked Witch of the West. I think it'll be your return to Broadway.” He went back to Universal Studios, knocked on the door of Marc Platt, the producer, and said, “Everybody tells me you're not able to get a decent shooting script for this book, which I've now read about half of. I know why. It's because since 1939, the world has known that everyone in Oz sings. This book has to sing before it can be filmed. If you give me the permission to put it on Broadway, we can make it into an operation that you can then film in good time.” Marc said, “Works for me, but you're going to have to persuade Gregory, because he has the rights, and he's the one who will make the final decision.”

Stephen and I met, and he was persuasive, and I thought, this is a big economic risk for my family, but I'm going to follow my instincts and say yes. So, it became a musical, for which I was paid in the low five figures for the rights. But in the end, that was exactly the right choice to make, because it's now a part of world culture.

Megan: Before the first Wicked movie came out, you had a chance to watch some of the filming. Did you have the same opportunity on Wicked: For Good?

Gregory: I had purposely, this year, not watched any trailers, not listened to any interviews or podcasts about what the second movie was going to look like or sound like. On October 27 in New York City, I saw a special preview by invitation only for people in the Broadway community, as one of the creatives of the play. I went home on the train feeling like after 29 years of signing a contract with Universal Studios, I can now retire my ambition to see this on the screen before I die. So, I'm very happy about that. As I live and breathe, it was out of this world to see.