The studio was scared about paying $100m to make a fantasy movie with no big male roles. This was before The Lord of the Rings, before Harry Potter. Universal developed it as a film for a while but weren’t getting satisfactory scripts. Whoopi Goldberg called, Demi Moore called. The calls from Hollywood came within a week of publication. Photograph: Joseph Marzullo/Wenn Rights Ltd/Alamy When writing, I cast the characters in my head so I could picture them: for Elphaba I cast kd lang. Even though I didn’t anticipate that Wicked would become a musical, I thought Elphaba had to be able to sing in the novel. I wanted to pay homage to The Wizard of Oz novelist L Frank Baum: LFB – Elphaba! It’s clean and simple, but not pretty, and with connotations of otherworldliness. Within the first couple of days I got her name. My novel would start with her birth, end with her death and have a 19th-century moral urgency. I decided to tell her life as if Dickens was doing it. No one says how The Wicked Witch of the West became as she was. Everyone was asking: how could those boys be so villainous? Were they born evil or were there circumstances that pushed them towards behaving like that? It propelled me back to the question of evil that bedevils anybody raised Catholic. Then the terrible murder of James Bulger happened and it was discovered that children had killed him. When I moved to London in the early 1990s, I was rather lonely and isolated.
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