As Cynthia Erivo accepted the Santa Barbara International Film Festival's Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film on Thursday night, amidst rapturous applause, she shared, "I always consider such accolades as milestones in a career's journey, and I'm not even halfway through mine yet." The actress-singer, who is poised to receive her second consecutive Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Elphaba, aka the Wicked Witch of the West, in the Universal blockbuster Wicked: For Good, continued, "I accept this award with gratitude, as it reminds me of how far I've come and how much further I have to go. This is a beautiful pit stop on the path to greatness."
Throughout the evening, Erivo was the center of attention at a table in the Ritz-Carlton Bacara's ballroom, flanked by Wicked: For Good director Jon M. Chu and producer Marc Platt. As SBIFF executive director Roger Durling opened the ceremony by hailing her as "one of the most incandescent lights working today," he added with a nod to the late Kirk Douglas, "Kirk would have had a great laugh and a dry martini with Ms. Erivo."
A truly awe-inspiring montage of Erivo's film and television performances, assembled by the festival's Mike McGee, was played, underscoring the fact that her screen career spans just a decade. It began with her unforgettable Tony-winning turn in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple and has included standout roles in Widows, Bad Times at the El Royale, Harriet (for which she received Oscar and songwriting nominations), Genius: Aretha (for which she received an Emmy nomination), Luther: The Fallen Son, Pinocchio, and Poker Face (where she played five different characters in one episode, earning another Emmy nod). She has now been nominated for Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys, and has won one of each except for an Oscar. Durling declared, "We need to get on that."
Platt, who produced both the Broadway and film versions of Wicked, later took the stage and said, "Thank Oz for Cynthia Erivo." He praised her insistence on portraying Elphaba with dignity and her fearlessness in performing songs both live and while "flying." He added, "It's in the silent moments where her true superpower is revealed. It's in those moments when her body or her eyes bore into the camera and into us that we feel her soul, her emotion, her hurt, her want, her hope, and her love. Finding the essential truth is the essence of great acting."
Chu hailed Erivo as "someone who knows what it means to feel unheard and refuses to let anyone else feel that way." He asserted, "This is my sister, my defiant, brilliant, badass witch—but she's not 'mine,' she belongs to herself. I am only the witness with a very expensive camera. I'm the one allowed to capture her butterflies and show you what I found. We are blessed—truly, truly blessed—to live in a generation that gets to experience Cynthia Erivo freshly unearthed."
As Chu presented Erivo with her award, she whispered, "To stand in front of you is to be reminded that there is so much work to be done. This award is a battery that powers the curiosity to carry on, to continue excavating what it is to live, to tunnel into the depths and fly up to the peaks of humanity." She added, "It is a challenge to keep finding the voices that open us up to who we are and how we want to live. It is a challenge to be unafraid in my choices, to search for the lightest of beings and the darkest of hearts and those that exist in between. You see, I love my job."
