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Jonathan Bailey is making NSFW jokes about the physical transformation he undergoes in Wicked: For Good.
When PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive sat down with Esquire U.K. for an interview published Friday Nov. 21 as the Wicked sequel opens in theaters, the actor said that his transformation into the Scarecrow character fans know from the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz “was all prosthetics” applied to his face and body.
“The first thing that I started thinking about, even before the ‘Dancing Through Life’ choreography, was exactly what the Scarecrow would look like,” Bailey said of the movie. His character Fiyero is turned into the Scarecrow by Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) when she casts a spell to save Fiyero’s life midway through the movie.
“So, yeah, there were loads of makeup tests. But it was all real,” he added about the prosthetics work that went into the role. “There was a lot of plumbing under the skin to try and keep me cool. Without the straw hair, I just looked like a big wheat penis.”
Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures
Bailey costars with Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Ethan Slater and Marissa Bode in Wicked: For Good, which follows the second act of the popular Broadway musical Wicked. (The musical itself is based on the 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, which in turn is a reworking of L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the 1939 movie adaptation.)
The new movie follows Erivo and Grande’s characters Elphaba and Glinda as they take opposing sides in the brewing conflict between Elphaba and the Wizard of Oz (Goldblum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). The movie’s plot interlines with that of The Wizard Of Oz’s, when a well-known tornado brings a certain young woman named Dorothy to Oz.
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Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures
Elsewhere in the interview, Bailey hinted at a theoretical possibility that more Wicked movies could be made, noting that his character and Erivo’s “go on to have children in the book” the movie is based on. “I have no idea. I mean, the world is so incredible. Who knows?” He said this when directly asked if there will be a third Wicked movie. “I mean, all the characters have potential…”Wicked: For Good is in theaters now.
