With Wicked: For Good finally releasing in cinemas tomorrow, Cynthia Erivo has been speaking a lot about her work, but one of the stories she’s shared lately was about her final conversation with her estranged father, a moment she’s carried since she was 16.
Cynthia wrote about the encounter in her memoir Simply More, and spoke about it again on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast. She explained that her father had never been “permanently” in her life, but he did always pay for her card to travel to and from school. When she was 16, that suddenly changed.
What was their last conversation about?
While they were at a London Underground station, he told her he didn’t want to pay for her transit pass anymore. Cynthia said she became angry and overwhelmed.
She recalled not knowing how to “not lose her sh*t.” She said that she told him, “This one thing you have to do. I don’t understand why you’re not doing it right now.”
A ticket officer stepped in during the argument and told her she “shouldn’t talk to her father like that”. She immediately responded, “You need to be quiet, this has nothing to do with you, you have no idea what is happening here.”
After some back and forth, her dad said, “I’ll get the travel cards, but I don’t want to see you again.”
He bought the cards, walked away in the opposite direction, and Cynthia was left in shock. She said, “I didn’t realise it would hurt as much, and it did hurt.”
Still crying, she got on the train going the wrong way. When she turned back to head in the right direction, she saw her father again, and he walked past her “like he’s never met me before.”
So, have they spoken since?
via YouTube
Since that day, they have only seen each other twice, once when she was 25 and again when she was 35, both times at weddings. They didn’t speak on either occasion.
Cynthia said the estrangement left her feeling closed off. She stopped asking for help, did most things on her own, and pushed people away because she assumed they would leave.
Through therapy, she’s learned that someone leaving doesn’t automatically mean they are abandoning you. Sometimes it’s simply part of their own path and doesn’t mean everyone else will do the same.
In Simply More, she writes that she now understands her father “was never meant to be a dad.”
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