‘Wicked: For Good’ revives an uncomfortable debate about bodies and images

(CNN) — The “Wicked” musical and its offshoot movies are meant to celebrate diversity and preach radical acceptance in the face of rising fascism. The protagonist, the witch Elphaba, is consistently misjudged for her bright green skin.

As “Wicked: For Good” has filled theaters and its publicity tour has circled the world, though, some fans have focused on a different matter of appearances: the women starring in the movie are really, really, really skinny — enough to draw attention and enthusiasm in the circles of the internet where users celebrate and promote eating disorders. Pictures of the “Wicked” leads, in strapless or backless red-carpet outfits that showcase their thinness, are shared as motivation for people to starve themselves or restrict eating.

“I need to know her BMI so bad,” wrote one Tumblr user, of Ariana Grande, who plays the good witch, Glinda.

“She’s so goals,” wrote another user, along with a photo of Grande’s exposed scapulas and upper chest from the “Wicked: For Good” premiere. Nearly 800 users liked the post.

Oona Hanson, a parent coach specializing in eating disorders, has had parents reach out over concern about the images, even if they or their kids are excited about the movie.

“Regardless of what the actual medical or health status is of these actresses, which we don’t know, the ultra-thin images, I think, are very painful and can be triggering to someone who has, let’s say, seen their child become emaciated from an eating disorder,” she said. “Or they know their child was looking at images that look a lot like these press tour photos.”

Contemporary culture holds that it’s inappropriate to discuss the bodies, and especially the weight of the bodies, of public figures. Yet images of famous bodies are still globally marketed commodities, alongside all the shared social media photos of everyone else, and people have never stopped absorbing and responding to what they see.

And so, on and off social media, people are speculating about the apparent weight loss of Grande and her co-stars Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh, and debating its implications. Are they healthy? Is the movie safe for kids to watch? The actors themselves have not explicitly addressed the perceived change, although Grande pointedly reshared an interview from 2024 where she criticized constant speculation around her body, calling it “dangerous for all parties.”

If young people try to match what they’re seeing, though, they risk being hazardously underfed themselves. As a movie marketed toward young people, around a holiday season centered on food, “Wicked: For Good” has found itself at the center of a national conversation about weight loss, eating disorders (or ED), and the endless pursuit of thinness.

“We can’t just keep saying it’s not your body, you can’t comment on it, when not commenting on it is leading to a rise in ED culture, a rise in restrictive eating, a rise in literally just everyone wanting to be smaller,” musician Teniola Keck, who previously struggled with disordered eating, said on TikTok.

Hollywood has always had a love affair with thinness, but by the 2010s, society seemed to be changing. People embraced the ideas of “body positivity” and “body neutrality” — entertainers come in all shapes in sizes, ad campaigns and media prioritize diverse body types, and resisting the urge to comment on a person’s weight has become commonplace.

None of that seemed to stop the pendulum from swinging. Coinciding with the rise of GLP-1 medications, skinny is now in. On fashion runways, fewer than 1 percent of looks presented in the recent season were on models considered plus-size. The weight-loss hashtag #SkinnyTok has gone viral; celebrities are mysteriously shrinking before our eyes. Serena Williams, whose athletic build made her both a target of disparagement and an exemplar of physical excellence during her career, has begun promoting GLP-1s for weight loss in retirement, calling it “health care.”

All of this has left people constantly, fervently talking about bodies without even being able to agree about how to talk about bodies. After losing weight, singer Meghan Trainor — who became famous in 2014 for “bringing booty back” — released a song called “Still Don’t Care” earlier this month, seemingly addressing the contention: “That’s the same sh*t I’ve heard my whole life / Said I was too thick, then I got way too thin.” That her lyrics mirror Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” from 2007 only underscores the cyclical nature of our culture’s weight obsession.

Other entertainers have had more nuanced responses. Days after Trainor released her new song, Lizzo wrote about how her own body was changing, after she found exercise and Pilates in the midst of severe depression. In a public newsletter, she grappled with the timing of it all, going through her own weight loss for her own reasons when “extended sizes are being magically erased from websites. Plus sized models are no longer getting booked for modeling gigs. And all of our big girls are not-so big anymore.”

Still, Lizzo wrote, if women want to change, they should be allowed to change, even as society has “a lot of work to do, to undo the effects of the ozempic boom.”

It is this conversation that the “Wicked” cast landed at the center of. People can want to change their bodies. People can change their bodies. But what happens when that change is potentially harmful to others? How does anyone discuss it? Should anyone discuss it?

Talking about people’s bodies can be a trigger for those struggling with eating disorders, said Brianna Campos, a body image coach and therapist; the rampant media attention and before and after photos of the cast only add to that.

That the conversation is about their bodies more than about their performances in the movie shows how relentless the social forces focusing on women’s appearances are, Campos said. Diet culture masquerading as health and wellness profits from people obsessing over their weight.

“Unless we fit the super unrealistic standard of what society says for us, you can’t win. There is actually no winning,” Campos said.

For Alexa Cohen, a mental health counselor for patients struggling with eating disorders, the stars’ bodies were all she could think about while watching “Wicked: For Good.” As a person in recovery herself, she noticed the way the movie seemingly emphasized Grande’s figure. For her patients, even those that have only seen the discourse online, seeing these “really thin and malnourished characters” be idolized can trigger their own illnesses — especially given that the actors looked different before.

“I think seeing that change for them can set them back a little bit,” Cohen said. “Seeing that that can happen to somebody’s body, and that they want it to happen to their body.”

Studies show that eating disorders have skyrocketed since the beginning of the pandemic, said Jason Nagata, professor of pediatrics at University of California, San Francisco and adolescent eating disorder specialist. At his hospital in San Francisco, hospitalizations and referrals for eating disorders doubled. Even if not diagnosed with an eating disorder, about two-thirds of teenagers nationally are trying to change their weight or change their appearance somehow, Nagata said. Despite surface-level shifts, body dissatisfaction is “widespread.” Media is part of that.

“Media portrayals matter, and are actually one of the biggest influences that we know, in the eating disorders field, to anyone’s body image,” Nagata said. “But I think that teenagers and young adults are particularly susceptible.”

As so many celebrities embrace GLP-1s for weight loss — either quietly or publicly — or just suddenly appear smaller, our culture’s desire to be skinny is exposed again, even as our rhetoric had seemingly shifted. As with “Wicked,” that larger trend has also dragged discussion of bodies back into the forefront. The entertainment industry has always put pressure on performers to look a certain way. Those in the public eye are not immune to society’s subliminal, and now not-so-subliminal, messaging about bodies. None of us are.

“There’s always going to be talk,” Cohen said. “But I feel like it’s constant now.”

In a world that’s so anti-fat, decisions around weight don’t happen in a vacuum, Hanson said. When constantly being told your body is wrong, is not desirable, or is not worthy of care or respect, it’s hard to say changing weight is a truly individual choice.

“Our preferences and desires are shaped by our culture,” Hanson said. “It’s really hard to tease apart what you actually want for your own body versus what the culture is telling you you have to achieve, in order to have access to all these things that we promise people if they look a certain way.”

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