Cynthia Erivo Is Out Magazine’s Icon of the Year & Cover Star

Out Magazine just debuted its 30th annual Out100 list, with Cynthia Erivo as cover star and Icon of the Year!

Behind the scenes at her cover shoot, Cynthia shared, “I am very proud to be on the cover of the Out100 list,” adding she is in a place where she feels “super proud to be who I am, proud to be out. It is a moment of full-circle for me.”

She insisted, “No dream is too big, no thought is too small. Everything that makes you you is going to make your art, or what you want to do, special.”

It’s a big year for Erivo, who stars as Elphaba in the film adaptation of “Wicked.”

Cynthia opened up in the issue about how she could relate to the character.

“It’s hard to talk about Elphaba as other without having it intrinsically linked to being a woman who walks through the world as a queer Black woman,” she said. “Immediately I understood what it meant for people to look at you and see you as not beautiful, not acceptable, not any of those things because I walked through the world like this. And having a way to not necessarily be okay with it but be okay with yourself enough so that when other people put that on you, you can still move through it.”

She added that the film is about “the acceptance of people that are different, whether it is walk of life or color of one’s skin or the power a person holds that might be different from your own.”

In the behind-the-scenes video, Cynthia also spoke about Elphaba’s relationship with Glinda in the movie.

Erivo said, “I hope that the story of ‘Wicked’ and the unlikely friendship that comes together within it is that those two beautiful women are so far from each other, so different, but somehow they manage to see the similarities and the likenesses between each other… and they find a common ground and also just accept the differences they have.”

She continued, “So if you connect, if you find a way to find where the commonality is you'll probably find someone who's there to support you too and that difference is for me the spice of life.”

See more behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot below!

For more, go to out.com and pick up the print edition on October 29. “Wicked: Part 1” is in theaters November 22.