Bethany Weaver is certainly dancing through life.
In “Wicked: For Good,” which hit theaters on Friday, the actress stars as Dorothy Gale, the “Wizard of Oz’s” titular pigtail wearing character. It’s a role she manifested years ago.
In March 2022, Weaver shared a video to Instagram singing “The Wizard and I.”
She captioned the footage: “Had a little sing song after work today, I love teaching but miss performing on stage so very much. It’s not perfect but brings me such joy 🌻 also aggressively manifesting that one day I will be in wicked!”
Both part one and two of Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” heavily features the origin stories of characters from the “Wizard of Oz.”
Along with Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba’s (Cynthia Erivo) journey, viewers will see Scarecrow (Jonathan Bailey), the Tin Man (Ethan Slater), and the Cowardly Lion (Colman Domingo).
Unlike “Wicked” on Broadway, Dorothy will have a more prominent role in the movie. However, audiences won’t see her face.
She is only seen from behind and has no lines.
“I think that’s such a wonderful thing to do, because then everyone gets to keep the Dorothy that they know,” Erivo, 38, expressed to Empire Magazine in September.
“I didn’t want to step on who you think Dorothy is in whatever story that you came into this with,” Chu, 46, added to People in October.
The director explained that the story is “still Elphaba and Glinda’s journey, and she is a pawn in the middle of all of it.”
Universal Pictures kept Weaver’s identity a secret until the “Wicked: For Good” premiere. Despite being listed in the credits of the film, her resume on her management’s website simply states an undisclosed part in the “Wicked” projects.
Weaver didn’t join the cast on any of their red carpet stops during the recent press tour.
Meanwhile, the dancer hails from Surrey, a town located in South East England, per her WhatsOnStage bio.
Weaver trained at the Urdang Academy in London and graduated in June 2018. Celebrating the monumental moment, she penned to Instagram at the time: “Here’s to the very exciting future ♡.”
The star also noted she loves to spend her free time at the Pilates studio.
“When I’m not performing, choreographing or acting, you’ll find me here on the reformer, at the barre or on the mat 💜,” she wrote on Instagram in March. “I’m so grateful for the mini empire I have built for myself that allows me to live the life I have always dreamed of ✨ Here’s to continuing to grow, build and conquer ✨.”
However, another major change in “Wicked: For Good” is that Dorothy is no longer sporting ruby slippers.
In the original 1939 film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, she takes the red sequin shoes off of the Wicked Witch of the East after a house falls on her.
Later in the film, Dorothy gets back home by clicking the heels of those sparkling shoes together three times.
This time around, Chu followed the “Wizard of Oz” book, which was written by L. Frank Baum in 1900.
“They’re not ruby,” the movie’s costume designer, Paul Tazewell, told People. “In the book, they were these odd little silver boots.”
“There’s the idea of Cinderella and the glass slipper, and then it’s like how we make shoes a myth and how we’ve indulged them into our fantasy fairytale storytelling,” he continued. “In the book they were silver shoes, and then they became crystal and silver shoes.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
