Bad broke several box office records during its opening weekend, grossing $165 million worldwide as fans around the world filled theaters to see the story come to life on the big screen.

For Gregory Maguire, the author of the book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the Weston which the film was based is a far cry from the Oz he first conceived nearly thirty years ago.

“It’s way better than it has any right to be,” Maguire said of the film, starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande as the young Glinda the Good Witch, with Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, caught between them in a love triangle.

Now Maguire’s story captivates a new generation with the two-part film adaptation, the second of which will be released in November 2025.

But in 1994 he was broke, living in a cramped flat in London and uncertain about his future.

“I was what the British call a ‘financial embarrassment,’” Maguire told Yahoo Entertainment. Due to the terms of his visa, he could not work legally, and his only option was to write. He recalled his roommate making a suggestion: “She said, ‘Gregory, I have a great idea. Why don’t you just write a bestseller?’”

Maguire had written several children’s books at the time, but none had made much of an impact. He was eager to tackle broader themes such as pain, tragedy and how societal expectations shape who we are.

What started as a modest idea: reimagining the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West from the books by L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – turned into an unexpected phenomenon. Published in 1995, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West not only became a bestseller, but was also adapted into a hit Broadway musical that has become one of the longest-running shows in history, grossing an estimated $5 billion in worldwide ticket sales since its opening in 2003.

Looking back, Maguire said his roommate’s advice feels almost prophetic.

“I didn’t write Bad to make myself rich,” he explained. “The truth is, I was 39 and I thought, ‘Okay, you better write this before someone else does, because it’s a good idea.'”

‘Are people born bad?’

In the musical version ofBadGlinda asks the audience a question: “Are people born evil, or is evil forced upon them?”

It’s a question that haunted Maguire after the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two young boys in Britain, which inspired the central theme of Bad.

“How do two ten-year-olds wake up in the morning and become murderers at night?” he wondered at the time. There were theories – a fatherless home, sibling bullying – but none suited Maguire. He took a similar approach when creating the Elphaba character.

Elphaba’s backstory is tragic: rejected by her father because of her green skin, and forced to face the death of her mother. “I wanted to put a lot of different concepts and theories about evil on paper without drawing a conclusion,” said Maguire, who found personal parallels in Elphaba’s story.

“I was raised Catholic, I’m a gay man, I was the middle child of seven, my mother died when I was born. All that makes me,” he explained. “Similarly, all the things that have happened to Elphaba are part of why she becomes the way she becomes – but it’s not just one thing.”

In writing the novel, Maguire wanted readers to make their own judgments about Elphaba as she struggles with unspoken questions about her identity and beliefs. Her resolve is tested when she refuses to join the oppressive regime of the Wizard of Oz, prompting his propaganda machine to falsely label her as “evil” and subject her to unjust persecution.

An unlikely friendship with Glinda, her popular but insecure college roommate, forces Elphaba to wonder: am I really bad, or has the world decided to make me that way?

Nearly thirty years after the book was published, Maguire doesn’t know the answer.

“I still don’t know what evil is,” he said. “What I do know is that a human person who commits an evil act suffers from an enormous amount of self-loathing. I think bad behavior is only possible if we cannot show empathy for other people – or even for ourselves.”

Maguire acknowledges that both the Broadway musical and the film took creative liberties with its original vision. In his novel, Elphaba was conceived along the lines of Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch in 1939. The Wizard of Oz.

“I hardly recognize it as my book anymore,” he said. “(Elphaba from the novel) is sharp, opinionated and powerful. In the film, Cynthia Erivo is also sharp, opinionated and powerful, but she is also sweet, and that is a very interesting mystery. I watch her performance in awe and think, ‘How could you perform it?’

The boys from Oz

When Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900 the US was struggling with industrial innovation and territorial expansion.

Maguire sees Baum’s Oz—with its characters traveling through unfamiliar lands and encountering others who look and behave differently—as a metaphor for America’s struggles with growth, displacement, and otherness in the early 20th century, especially as it is about stealing Indian land.

Maguire said he consciously integrated these themes into his own vision, using Oz as a reflection of America’s challenges and a cautionary tale about the repetition of the past.

“I wanted cultures within Oz to misunderstand each other, to be racist and hegemonic, and to be responsible for the ways in which their society doesn’t work,” he explained. “That way I wanted it to represent the United States sometime between 1900 and 1930.”

Maguire has published four sequels to the original novel and a prequel, Elphieexpected in 2025. Bad continues to evolve and Oz remains a world full of contradictions. At the same time, Maguire said it is a place of imagination, resilience and an enduring hope for something better than the rainbow.

“I portrayed the world as I understood it,” Maguire said. “Perhaps I have subconsciously understood that bad things that have endangered us in the past will always remain in danger.”

Update, November 25, 2024: This story was originally published on November 18, 2024 and has been updated with weekend box office numbers.