Cynthia Erivo Opens Up About Her Queerness: ‘The More Yourself You Are, The Better Understanding Starts to Happen'

Yahoo

2 days ago

There was a time when could glide around town on her Razor scooter in peace. 'Don't laugh!' she quips as she reminisces about those halcyon days while sitting in a cozy loft above a cavernous Los Angeles studio. 'I've been doing it for years!'
Whether maneuvering New York's busy streets or transporting her from her L.A. home to a nearby studio to record voice-over work, Erivo's reliable kick scooter was once her preferred mode of transit. But even a decade ago, she was warned that her hobby wasn't sustainable with the life she was building. '[Director] John Doyle said to me, 'Cynthia, you're not going to be able to do that for very long,' ' she recalls. 'And I was like, 'But why? I'm good! It's fine!' '
More from Billboard
Cynthia Erivo: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot
The Roots Apologize to Fans After First Day of 2025 Roots Picnic Marred By Long Lines: 'Safety Will Always Be Our Number 1 Priority'
Rod Stewart Postpones Las Vegas Colosseum Residency Gig Due to Unspecified Illness
His prediction ultimately came true. In the years since making her 2015 Broadway debut in Doyle's production of The Color Purple, Erivo has transformed from buzzy theater ingenue to certified, capital 'S' star by practically every metric. At just 38, the multihyphenate is already nearly an EGOT (she's only missing her Oscar, despite three nominations); has starred in prestige TV series like The Outsider, Genius and Poker Face; paid tribute to musical legends at the Kennedy Center; and, most recently, scooped up that third Oscar nom with Wicked, the highest-grossing musical adaptation in film history.
Along the way, Erivo hasn't lost sight of what matters to her, using the star power she has accrued for good. When she publicly came out as queer in 2022, she cited the importance of helping 'some young Black queer actress somewhere' feel less alone in the industry. At the top of 2025, she took home GLAAD's prestigious Stephen F. Kolzak Award for her continuing commitment to promoting visibility for the LGBTQ+ community. And in June, she'll bring her talents to the massive WorldPride celebrations in Washington, D.C., making sure that everyone hears her voice — including politicians aiming to strip her community's rights.
For her latest endeavor, though, Erivo decided to take the same energy she puts into both her community and others' projects and turn it inward. She didn't take to the stage or the screen, but rather the studio, looking to reinvigorate her solo music career — and the result is her revelatory second album, I Forgive You, out June 6 through Verve and Republic Records.
Back in September 2021, Erivo released Ch. 1 Vs. 1, her debut LP of adult contemporary tracks where she aimed — and, reflecting today, thinks she failed — to provide a soundtrack to her life up until that point. 'It never quite felt like it was mine,' she says. She recounts working with a group of 'lovely' producers and writers who provided plenty of new ideas and sounds — yet the project itself underutilized her own vocal dexterity. 'It didn't feel like it was one uniform story.'
So when she began thinking about her next album, she started from scratch. On the advice of Wicked co-star Ariana Grande, Erivo met with Republic Records co-president/COO Wendy Goldstein to discuss her strengths and figure out a path forward. What could Erivo do that nobody else could? 'Everything fell into place really fast from there,' Goldstein recalls of their first meeting.
The answer was simple: Erivo's greatest asset is and always has been her protean voice, an instrument that belies her diminutive frame and lets her craft entire worlds of intricate harmonies. Her mother has said she first heard her daughter sing beautifully at a mere 18 months old, though Erivo has since said she first recognized her own innate talent around the ripe old age of 11. Following a brief stint studying music psychology at the University of East London, she dropped out, later enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (where she now serves as vice president). After graduating in 2010 and spending three years performing around the United Kingdom, Erivo landed a breakthrough role in the off-West End production of The Color Purple in 2013.
'Anyone who saw her in that performance knew pretty quickly that she was just a generational talent,' says Jessica Morgulis, Erivo's longtime manager who began working with her a year before The Color Purple transferred to Broadway in 2015. 'In all my days of going to the theater, I've never seen the entire audience leap out of their seats mid-song in applause.'
So when it came to creating her own music, Goldstein asked why Erivo wasn't leaning into her biggest strength. 'When you hear Cynthia's voice, you're transfixed. I felt like we needed to lead with that,' Goldstein says. 'We spoke a lot about how to really highlight her vocals, using it as an instrument with stacking and layering to create beautiful production.'
That, Erivo says, unlocked something for her. 'Wendy is a very singular human being who just gets it,' she says. 'It was the first time that everything became really clear. To have someone who understands who you are as a musician and a singer and an artist was just a new experience within this space for me as an artist.'
The subsequent project, executive-produced by Erivo and her longtime collaborator, Will Wells, spans pop, soul, jazz, disco, gospel and more, with her voice front and center. But more importantly, after a career dedicated to portraying characters, I Forgive You is just Erivo, telling the world who she is.
'People see a very cookie-cutter version of me, and we do this thing with people where we isolate them or crystallize them in one space and go, 'She's just that,' ' she says. 'People don't know me as a musician in the way they're getting to know me now.'
As Erivo arrives for our conversation, you'd never guess that she's coming off one of the biggest performances of her life. Less than 48 hours earlier, she was belting out her forthcoming ballad, 'Brick by Brick,' and Prince's 'Purple Rain' alongside maestro Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic during a surprise appearance at the orchestra's Coachella set. 'I was so surprised at how vast that audience was,' she giddily admits. 'It was unbelievable.'
Though Erivo remains humbly awestruck by the ensemble inviting her to perform for her biggest crowd to date, her own reputation has preceded her from the jump. 'I mean, for anyone who likes singers, all of our algorithms were just filled with endless bootlegs of her singing her f–king ass off,' all-star songwriter Justin Tranter says of her Tony Award-winning Broadway debut.
But while the world was tuned into Erivo's jaw-dropping performances of The Color Purple's showstopper 'I'm Here,' she found herself focused on something else entirely while playing the character of Celie: her sexuality. 'I hadn't really ever explored [my queerness], I hadn't really ever discovered or understood or really learned about it,' she says. 'I was like, 'Oh, I get to play this woman who is exploring and learning about her own queerness at the same time as trying to discover what love is.' This sort of wonderful thing happened at the same time — I got to do the same for myself.'
Erivo had been out to her close friends and family since her early twenties, but playing Celie for two years began to open the door to come out publicly, as fully embodying the experience of a queer woman eight times a week slowly made her more assured. 'It's like your feet finally hit the ground,' she explains. 'Even the work that I started doing, whether I'm on a set or in a studio, I just felt a lot more relaxed.'
With that newfound sense of ease came a wave of projects. After closing out her run in The Color Purple, she booked her first film roles, in Drew Goddard's Bad Times at the El Royale and Steve McQueen's Widows, holding her own on-screen with stars like Viola Davis and Jeff Bridges. With her starring performance in 2021's Harriet, Erivo earned her first pair of Academy Award nominations (for best actress and best original song) — had she won, she would have become the youngest person ever to earn EGOT status.
'How lovely is that? To be in this position at this point in my career is one, a privilege — but two, a massive surprise,' Erivo says of her near EGOT. 'To be one of those people that's on the edge of even looking that in the face is quite wonderful.'
Morgulis credits Erivo's sharp instincts, saying she's 'almost never wrong' when picking projects and pointing to her client's multiple viral performances at the Kennedy Center Honors, where Erivo has honored Dionne Warwick, Julie Andrews and Earth, Wind & Fire, as an example.
'Often, the producers of something like that will be leaning one way, because whoever it is you're paying homage to has some favorite song of theirs they want to hear,' she says. 'But Cynthia knows herself so well and will say, 'I know I can really give this individual the best performance from me if we do this other song.' And every time, she nails it.'
Yet despite her many successes, Erivo says nothing could have prepared her for the cultural phenomenon that was Wicked. She knew the film would do well, but she never predicted it would break box-office records and earn a whopping 10 Oscar nominations. 'It's insane,' she says. 'And it's insane while it's happening, too.'
Of all Wicked's achievements, none shocked Erivo as much as the soundtrack's immediate Billboard chart success. It bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 (the highest debut for a film adaptation of a stage musical in the chart's history), ruled the Top Album Sales and Vinyl Albums charts, and landed seven songs on the Billboard Hot 100, with her own version of 'Defying Gravity' earning the highest position among them at No. 44. 'The cast was like, 'Oh, so it's just in the ether now? People are just listening to it on their way to work at this point?' ' Erivo recalls. 'It's really wonderful.'
The second part of the duology, Wicked: For Good, will arrive in November, and Erivo warns fans unfamiliar with the source material that her viridescent heroine, Elphaba, enters much darker territory in the second act. 'She's able to access her rage more,' she says. 'The scent I wore changed. The makeup changed. Little shifts that bring you to a more mature version of who Elphaba becomes. And she is delicious in this next one.'
The Wicked Witch of the West isn't the only one who has changed in between the two films' releases — with rave reviews and another Oscar nomination for her stellar performance in the first act, Erivo became a household name practically overnight. That transition has occasionally felt scary, especially when it comes to maintaining her personal privacy.
'I think there is an interesting thing that happens, where it's assumed that because you're in the public eye, everything is for everyone,' she explains. 'But being in the public eye does not stop you from being a human being — you just have eyes on you now. I am totally OK to share some of my life — whenever you see me on the stage, whenever you hear me sing, whenever you see me act, I am sharing. But that doesn't mean that everything gets to be yours. I should be able to keep something for myself.'
That 'something' likely includes her visible, but never publicly confirmed (including for this story) relationship with lauded producer-writer Lena Waithe. 'You also wouldn't want me to share everything — nobody should have to, because then what's left?' she says with a half-smile. 'You can be grateful, but you can still have a boundary.'
But thanks to the groundwork she has laid over the course of the last decade, Erivo says she doesn't feel flummoxed by her sudden stardom. 'I'm glad that I had those breakthroughs before — it's school for what might come, and it means that here and now, it doesn't feel like it's going to sweep me up,' she says. 'A lot of us fear that if this happens, you'll sort of lose yourself. But I still feel like myself.'
There is a moment in 'Play the Woman,' an early, R&B-adjacent standout from I Forgive You, when Erivo taps an unexplored topic in her career thus far: unabashed desire. 'I could run these hands of mine down the map of your spine/Feel how your heat against my fingertips could make the blood in me rush,' she croons on the pre-chorus before blooming into her glossy head voice: 'Could you play the woman for me?/Go slow, 'cause I like what I see.'
Erivo had long wanted to explore sensuality in her acting. But when the parts didn't materialize, she decided to take matters into her own hands. 'Honestly, you rarely get that opportunity as Black women anyway,' she says. 'So I was just like, 'Well, if I don't put it in my own music, I'll never get to put it anywhere else.' '
That ethos runs through I Forgive You, as Erivo breaks out of the boxes that the industry at large constructed around her ever-growing career while simultaneously giving voice to the parts of herself that she was once too scared to reveal in public. Whether she's providing a grooving rumination on self-doubt with 'Replay' or delivering an airy ballad about finally finding connection after years of trying on 'I Choose Love,' Erivo lays all her cards on the table.
'It wasn't scary to write because I really didn't know how else to write it. It had to come,' she explains. 'The scary thing was getting ready to share it. When something is personal, you hope that people understand that your humanity exists and they're not just listening to random stories that come from nowhere.'
When going into their sessions with Erivo, Tranter was already well-aware that she had one of the best voices in the business. What they quickly discovered was just how adept a songwriter she was, too. 'She's a real visionary in that she knows what the f–k she's doing,' Tranter says. 'It's not even that I was surprised, it's just that the world doesn't know her that way. You don't know what to expect when someone like Cynthia hasn't been able to reveal all her talents yet.'
That's a recurring theme in Erivo's career: One of the main hurdles she faced while working on her debut album was record executives who were unsure how to utilize her talents or market her. She recalls one telling her, 'You can sing everything, and we don't know what to do with you.' Her response? ' 'Why don't we just try everything, then?' ' she remembers. ' 'If I can do it, then why not try?' '
It's a refrain Morgulis returns to often. With her client's aspirations spreading across multiple fields of entertainment, the manager says that it's vital for her to help Erivo remain in control of the projects she's working on. 'That conversation of not putting her in a box and, importantly, not allowing others to put her in a box, is happening on every single level of her team,' Morgulis says. 'That act alone kind of sends a message to the industry of who she is and what direction she's going in.'
And recently, Erivo has applied that philosophy to discussing her identity. After coming out publicly on the cover of British Vogue in 2022, she assumed a rare position in the entertainment business as a Black queer woman in the public eye, and it's a platform she takes seriously.
Her decision to come out, Erivo says, had less to do with her own sense of self-actualization and more to do with the deep sense of care she feels toward her community. 'I think I was actively looking for those who were encouraged to be more themselves,' she says. 'I can't change a person's opinion of me; if they want to feel some way, there is nothing I can do about that. But I was so excited about being able to at least be one more face where someone could say, 'Oh, my God, she did it and can still do it. She's still creating, she's still making. So maybe I can also do the same.' '
In hindsight, Erivo says she didn't feel any trepidation about her decision to come out and didn't notice any significant change in the roles she booked or the feedback she received for her performances. 'Maybe I'm naive and wasn't paying attention to it, because I'm sure there was [pushback],' she confesses.
The one notable exception came in early 2025, when the Hollywood Bowl announced that Erivo would star in the titular role of its upcoming three-night production of Jesus Christ Superstar. A predictable wave of conservative outrage followed at the thought of a Black queer woman portraying Jesus Christ, accusing the actress and the production itself of 'blasphemy.'
Erivo can't help but laugh. 'Why not?' she chuckles with a shrug, before adding that most of those comments don't seem to understand the critical lens of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. 'You can't please everyone. It is legitimately a three-day performance at the Hollywood Bowl where I get to sing my face off. So hopefully they will come and realize, 'Oh, it's a musical, the gayest place on Earth.' '
It's easy for Erivo to dismiss a vocal minority decrying the mere announcement of her casting in a limited-run performance; it becomes much harder when the conversation turns to politics. Like many, she has watched in horror as the Trump administration has attempted to strip the rights of and federal protections for queer and trans people across the country through a flurry of executive orders.
Erivo doesn't pretend to have all of the answers. 'I'm trying to be a person you can get positive things from, because that is the only way you can balance this stuff,' she says with a sigh. But when she looks at something like the current administration's 'anti-woke' takeover of the Kennedy Center — the place where she has delivered some of her most iconic performances to date — she can't help but feel a sense of dread. 'I don't know who gains what from that. I hope that it comes back,' she says. 'It's really sad to have to watch this happen to it. The Kennedy Center is supposed to be a space of creativity and art and music for everyone.'
Yet Erivo refuses to let that dread rule her actions. It's part of why, during Pride Month, she will perform a headlining set at the closing concert for WorldPride in Washington, D.C., alongside Doechii. 'I want to encourage people to not decide to just tuck away and start hiding and not being themselves anymore, because that is exactly what they want,' she says. 'The more yourself you are, the more you are in front of people who don't necessarily understand, the better understanding starts to happen.'
Tranter points to that sentiment as a perfect example of why Erivo has become such a powerful voice in the entertainment industry. 'Cynthia being Black and queer, and being one of the most famous people alive in this moment while our community is dealing with what we are dealing with, is no mistake,' they say. 'For someone as talented as her to be a beacon for young Black queer people all over the world, to be in the most successful movie and releasing a gorgeous, poetic album in this moment is no accident.'
It's apparent that Erivo holds herself to an incredibly high standard. As Morgulis rattles off the singer's schedule for the next few months — wrapping up filming on the forthcoming feature film adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone, hosting the 2025 Tony Awards and performing at least six solo concerts around the country, among dozens of other obligations — she must pause for a breath. 'It's a lot,' she says. 'But she can do it.'
But today, the singer stops short of perfectionism. Even in a career as fortunate as hers, she knows that she cannot be everything to everyone. 'I used to say, 'I don't want to make any mistakes. I don't want to get anything wrong,' ' she recalls. 'What I'm leaning toward is just trying to be the best version of myself, full stop. And hopefully, the best version of myself is enough for those who want it.'
Best of Billboard
Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1
Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits
H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart