Before it was a Hollywood blockbuster, it was a megahit musical, and before that it was a 1995 novel. Author Gregory Maguire tells the BBC about the inspiration behind Wicked.

When author Gregory Maguire was a child, he and his siblings would regularly act out scenes from the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. They even changed the story and perspectives just to entertain themselves. “The material was so malleable that you could change it and still be recognisable,” Maguire told the BBC. Little did he know that these childhood games would one day contribute to his life-changing novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West.

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the plot of Wicked.

In the early 1990s, Maguire was a respected children’s author who had “got good reviews but not big sales,” he says. After working as a professor at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature in Boston, and then co-founding the nonprofit educational charity Children’s Literature New England, Maguire wanted to write for adults. “I thought I had to throw everything I cared about into this book because I would never write another book again,” he says.

Maguire knew that the subject he wanted to explore in the novel was the nature of evil. What does it mean to be ‘evil’? Do we only characterize certain types of behavior? Are we judging the decay and corruption of someone’s moral character? Maguire knew that if he wanted to get readers on side, he would have to weave the subject into “an arresting plot that would appeal to hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” he says.

Then Maguire thought back to The Wizard of Oz. In particular, Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West, and her assignment interactions with Glinda, played by Billie Burke, at the beginning of the Victor Fleming film. “I thought to myself, ‘They know each other. They’ve crossed paths before. They went to school together!'” Creating this scenario in his head caused Maguire to laugh out loud. “I thought that was so funny. Because it was such a good idea.”

Maguire’s assumption turned out to be correct. Wicked’s revisionist exploration of both L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the 1939 film adaptation provide an expanded look at the life of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire named her Elphaba, a play on the original author’s initials. In the book, we see the reasons why Elphaba is considered evil, because societal perceptions and circumstances force her to act in ways that are considered mean.

Born with green skin, she is regularly looked at and made fun of. This prejudice makes her feel so much like an outcast that she excludes herself from other people. After discovering that the land’s sentient, talking animals are being imprisoned, Elphaba approaches Oz and asks him for help. But Oz brushes off her concerns, wanting the people to unite in the belief that the talking animals are their common enemy. Elphaba goes into hiding and joins an underground group to protect the animals. Oz then uses propaganda to tell the rest of the country that Elphaba is evil, even though she fights for justice and to protect the vulnerable. She then reacts to her sister’s death with righteous anger, and Glinda gives away her family’s shoes to Dorothy.

Although not a bestseller when it came out in 1995, the book was a word-of-mouth hit, Maguire says. “Every year it sold more than the year before. It was the true definition of a sleeper hit.” Stephen Schwartz’s decision to adapt the book into a musical made it even more popular. The musical version of Elphaba is misunderstood and friendlier than the increasingly dark and bitter version in the book. Wicked has been playing in New York since October 30, 2003, making it the fourth longest-running Broadway show of all time.

This success made a Hollywood adaptation inevitable. But like the musical, Wicked the film (part one) deviates from the book in several ways, perhaps to make it more accessible to mainstream audiences. Instead of being entirely Elphaba’s (Cynthia Erivo) story, we also see Glinda’s (Ariana Grande) perspective as the story revolves much more around their friendship. The film is set at Shiz University in the Land of Oz, where Elphaba and Glinda are forced to share a room. While they begin to hate each other, they soon become friends, both falling for the same handsome prince (Jonathan Bailey). But as they continue their studies, they uncover the sinister plot unfolding in the Land of Oz, forcing the land’s talking animals into hiding.

Dana Fox, who co-wrote the film Winnie Holzmansays part of Wicked’s success is due to the way Maguire twisted audience expectations. Before the book, everyone said, “The green witch is bad. We all know she’s bad. But if you ask anyone why she’s bad, they can’t answer,” Fox tells the BBC. ‘The brilliance of Maguire’s book is that he interrogated that very question.’

While Maguire was thinking about these themes and his possible story for Wicked, an incident occurred that made him think more deeply about the nature of evil. On February 12, 1993, two years old James Bulger was murdered by two 10-year-olds in Merseyside, England. As Maguire watched reports of this tragedy appear on television, people on programs and over dinner discussed the terrible crime these boys had committed. It left Maguire, who was living in London at the time, wondering: ‘Where did the decision to do what they did come from? Where did that capacity for evil come from?’ As the murder was further analyzed and intellectual debates continued over whether “sociological, biochemical or spiritual reasons were to blame”, Maguire says, he realized the atrocity had an impact on “everything he had considered” about Wicked. “That sad, sad event turned out to be a catalyst for me to move on,” says Maguire.

Shortly after the book was released, Maguire learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike had quoted from it in an essay he wrote on the subject of evil, he says. “The one line he quoted from Wicked in the article that sums this all up is: ‘It is the nature of evil to be secret.’ In a novel of 406 pages he had found the one sentence that was the most striking. coherent and comprehensive conclusion that I had prepared.”

Maguire insists he never came up with a “unified theory” of evil. He believes that self-hatred is one element, as the “biological imperative to survive and not hurt ourselves is so strong that if we hate ourselves enough, we stab the world instead of ourselves.” The best summary he has ever read of evil was written by Graham Greene in his novel The Power and the Glory. “He wrote that most evil is simply a lack of imagination.” Greene wrote about how fascism arises “because people can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone else,” says Maguire. In Wicked, Maguire shows that the Wizard uses populism and propaganda to maintain control of Oz, weaponizing these tools against animals that are different and against Elphaba because she disagrees with him.

For Fox, Wicked remains relevant because “certain people are still others in our society, or made to be the bad guys so that other people can gain power.” And Wicked’s continued resonance focuses on Elphaba’s story as she comes to feel like she doesn’t belong and doesn’t want to. green skin towards self-acceptance and self-love. “You don’t have to have green skin to know what that feels like. Everyone has thought about themselves that way in their lives,” says Fox. “There’s a little Elphaba in all of us. There’s a little Glinda in all of us. Empathizing so deeply with these characters is why people have loved this show and this story for so long.”

Wicked is released in the UK and US on November 22.