Okay, So What Is a Munchkin Now?
Wicked’s Munchkins have been reborn in Ethan Slater’s image.
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Citizens of Oz! We have an importificant announcification to make. In the latest morsel of lore from the upcoming Wicked movie that will make you go what in the Ozian hell is going on? all Munchkins are officially ginger now. In a recent cover story for GQ Hype, Wicked actor and Professional Human SpongeBob Ethan Slater gave a glimpse of approximately zero details or revelations into his relationship with co-star Ariana Grande, aside from sharing how difficult it’s been to go through a divorce and new high-profile relationship in the public eye.
Luckily, Wicked director Jon M. Chu swooped in for a secondary quote, and he spilled. About Slater’s personal life? No. About creating a new racialized phenotype for the fictional Ozian folk known as Munchkins? Yes, of course! Talking about Slater’s character’s backstory, Chu said:
“We wanted [Boq] to come from a culture, and so we were trying to reinvent what a Munchkin is. In our eyes, Munchkin was not a size,” Chu explains. “We built the Munchkinland look around him, in a weird way — like this red-haired, fair-skinned type of character.” The director envisioned an agricultural society full of “joyful, innocent people” who “harvested the joy [and] the colors of all of Oz” — the kind of setting where Slater’s natural physical strength and playfulness would thrive.
It’s funny, because even Slater admits that Boq, Wicked’s most prominent Munchkin, is a role for short kings. “Everybody who was around five-foot-seven in New York City knew about Boq being a role that you could audition for,” he confirmed. But in the weird and woolly world of Wicked: Part One’s internal logic, it’s offensive when Munchkins are defined by their height, but it’s actually normal and awesome when they’re all a race of primitive, playful red-headed folk who harvest colors and joy. You know, like leprechauns!
Get in here, Jon M. Chu is doing Munchkin phrenology. https://t.co/L6ASEFzPzd— serge daney mcbride (@abs_sweetmarie) October 30, 2024
As a five-foot-one person, this is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful fan poster of Cynthia Erivo, equal to people posing the question “is your ***** green.” None of this is funny. None of it is cute.
It degrades me
It degrades us.
To edit the Munchkins and hide their height is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.
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