Here, Bode reveals what it was like to film those dance scenes with Ethan Slater, how she approached Nessa’s character and the changes the team made to Nessa’s arc during the second film.

Social media was full of commentary after the first film came out. What have you thought about it all?

It’s been so interesting to me to see who people look at as the villain of Wicked. In my personal opinion, there [are] villain tendencies within all the characters, but it’s hard for me to call any of the characters villains because I think the whole point of Wicked is seeing the humanity within everyone. Like Glinda – she can be selfish at times, but she learns a lot and cares so deeply about other people. And Nessa – she can also be selfish sometimes, but there [are] reasons why she doesn’t always speak up for her sister, and why she so badly wants to be independent. I’ve been a lover of movie commentary for years, so it’s really cool to be part of a film that people are talking about.

There’s been a lot of love for the behind-the-scenes clips. What was your experience of being on set like?

I started rehearsals a month after I was cast – it would have been sooner, but I had to get my hands on a passport first. We rehearsed for a month or so before we started filming, and then we just got straight into it. The first thing that I filmed was the classroom scene with Doctor Dillamond, and being on that set for the first time blew my mind. After seeing that I was like, ‘There’s no way that the rest of the sets can be this wild and immaculate and fantastic and whimsical’, and then all the other sets that I went on after that somehow always one-upped one another. Being part of the CGI process was cool, too. They had a metal goat head for us to look at to get the eyeline right, and sometimes there would be an actor who would take that position to give us that vocal emotion to react to. I wasn’t very well versed in how it all worked before this, so getting the chance to experience it was amazing.

Talking about technical moments, your dance scene with Ethan Slater is a key turning point for Nessa. What was the process of putting that together like?

It was so incredibly fun. I had never danced like that before – prior to this, in terms of musical theatre, I’d mainly done local shows in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, and after I became disabled, I think people didn’t really know how to accommodate that [in a dance sense]. I didn’t know how to accommodate that either, because I never had the resources or had that representation. At that time in my life, I’d never even seen wheelchair dancers. So having the uber-talented Hannah Raynor, a wheelchair choreographer, to help me with that was really important. It was amazing being able to learn this incredible dance number and communicating so much without saying any words, because it’s such a pivotal moment for both mine and Ethan’s character. And I think it’s important in terms of disabled representation too, because it shows that we can fall in love, we can go to dances and we can have those experiences.

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