Cynthia Erivo isn’t one to shy away from a challenge.
The Wicked Oscar nominee, 38, will lead Dracula, Kip Williams’ West End adaptation of Bram Stoker’s horror classic, from February to May 2026. The twist: she’ll play the titular vampire and 22 other roles, alone onstage.
“I’m f—— petrified. I really am. I’m very scared,” Erivo shared in a new conversation with Jonathan Bailey for Wonderland Magazine. “But I’m also like — I don’t know, is this sadistic of me — but I’m really excited about it as well. It’s absolutely nonsensical and insane.”
As Erivo noted, she is making a “really full circle” return to the theater after leading the 2015 revival of The Color Purple that took her from London to a Tony Award-winning breakout on Broadway. “I haven’t been back to stage for such a long time,” she said. “The first time I really did anything that felt like a stage was Jesus Christ Superstar, and that was only three nights [in August].”
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Dracula is the follow-up from writer-director Williams after his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray took the West End and Broadway by storm. It starred a Tony-winning Sarah Snook in 26 different roles, which couldn’t help but inspire Erivo.
“I kept trying to resist it for the longest time,” she told Bailey, 37, of accepting the Dracula offer. “You just can’t escape these roles,” he responded.
“It just wouldn’t leave me alone,” recalled Erivo. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was like, ‘This is so crazy, this is insane.’” Going to see The Picture of Dorian Gray, she added, “I thought, ‘This is either going to make me run in another direction or really confirm that I have to do this.’ I went to see Sarah Snook, and I was like, ‘Oh s—.’”
“It speaks to your craft and your talent, and how far you’ve journeyed, to know that a one person show of Dracula is the only thing that can make you scared,” said Bailey, who himself returned to the London stage in Nicholas Hytner’s production of William Shakespeare’s Richard II last spring.
Erivo and Bailey star with Ariana Grande, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater and more in Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good, in theaters now.