Spoiler Special: Ethan Slater on Boq’s Cold-Hearted Transformation in “Wicked: For Good”
Spoilers!
As the pitchforks raise higher, the chants grow louder.
“Go! And hunt her! And find her! And kill her!”
The crowd becomes restless as tensions rise. They demand justice. Boq raises his hatchet and addresses the mob.
“So for once, I’m glad I’m heartless/I’ll be heartless killing her!”
He then turns slowly, looks upward to where Glinda stands on her balcony, and with pure hatred in his eyes, he glares.
For Ethan Slater, who plays Boq (aka the Tin Man) in Jon M. Chu‘s Wicked: For Good, there’s a lot of meaning behind that glare.
“I personally think that he leads the mob to this area of the Emerald City specifically to have her as an audience,” Slater explains. “I don’t know how conscious or unconscious that is, but that is something that I kind of feel. And then when he looks back up, he really can’t see the Glinda that he once knew. He’s too blinded by the torches, by the flames, by the rage, to see her in any meaningful way.”
“March of the Witch Hunters” is one of the most chilling songs in Wicked: For Good. It’s the climax of the film, the moment we understand the true impact of the Wizard’s propaganda about Elphaba, and watch as those who once called themselves her friends chant to kill her.
“I think even with somebody who is blindly rageful, there can be overlapping motivations,” Slater continues explaining. “And sometimes people do crazy things to get the attention of somebody, and also, sometimes people throw blame really hard at someone that they know they shouldn’t be blaming, because it’s easier. And we see it. We see it everywhere. We see it all the time. We see it in our real world all the time.”
In Wicked: For Good, Boq has a much smaller role, but Slater was arguably a standout.
Slater went from playing the goodhearted, adoring munchkin boy in the first film to the hardened, heartless Tin Man in the second. The transformation was as much of a physical one as it was mental.
“With all the prosthetics and the sort of heavy suit and all of that — I mean, the prosthetics were amazing. They helped the performance,” Slater explains. “And I also didn’t feel like I had to do anything differently. I could just kind of be myself. It just felt…heavier.”
Slater says it took about 20 minutes to get into the Tin Man suit and about 20 minutes to get out of it.
“So unless it’s a long turnaround, you kind of just have to stay in it,” he says of the filming process.
Beyond the physical transformation, Boq’s mental transformation into the Tin Man allowed Slater to dive deeper into his character.
“There’s this moment at the end of the first movie — the world is kind of crumbling,” Slater explains. “Everybody’s fleeing Shiz, and Boq kind of comes down the stairs and sees that everybody he knows is gone, and everyone he loves is gone.”
For Slater, he doesn’t think of his journey into the Tin Man so much as a transformation, but more so as Boq losing the very essence of himself.
“The thing that makes him who he is is his big, open heart,” he says. “And once his heart shrinks to being no longer there because of Nessa…all he’s left with is sort of this limbic rage.”
Slater’s love for both films and the original musical as a whole shines through in his dedication to his character. And although Boq’s fate in Wicked: For Good isn’t a happy one, Slater says his interpretation of Oz’s ending — particularly the final scene when the Grimmerie opens for Glinda — makes him “weep.”
“I think it’s so beautiful,” he says. “And I think in the first movie, Elphaba is a superhero, right? She finds her power inside, and she decides to use it to help people. In the second movie, Glinda is a superhero, and she realizes that there is a way that she can make real change in the world.”
Wicked: For Good is in theaters now.
Featured image: Ethan Slater is Boq/the Tin Man in “Wicked: For Good.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.
