A big ‘Wicked: Part Two’ moment for Marissa Bode’s character Nessarose will focus on “the magic of the story,” she tells PEOPLE
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Marissa Bode on November 9; in ‘Wicked: Part One’
Bad star Marissa Bode teases a big moment that audiences are still waiting for.
Bode, 24, plays Nessarose in the Jon M. Chu-directed stage-to-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical. The character is the sister of Cynthia Erivo’s future villain Elphaba and uses a wheelchair Bad: Part Two (in theaters Nov. 26, 2025), becomes the Wicked Witch of the East who terrorizes Munchkinland.
“One of the first conversations I had with Jon,” Bode tells PEOPLE, was about a pivotal scene in the show’s second act. Spoiler alert: the bejeweled silver slippers Nessarose inherited from her mother are enchanted with a magic that allows their wearer to stand and walk. When the character realizes that Elphaba and her Grimmerie spellbook can affect her disability, she begs her sister to do so.
Related: Marissa Bode fell back in her wheelchair during filming Bad Dance song ‘Dancing through life’
“I wasn’t there for the actual script change,” the actress teases, but Chu told her, “Hey, we changed this part this way so it felt less like an affirmation moment.”
Instead of Nessarose “advocating for solving disability,” she says, Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox’s script instead “just focuses on the magic in general and the magic of the story.”
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Marissa Bode on November 18
Bode adds, “And that’s all I can say, I guess!”
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Since Stephen Schwartz Bad Nessarose debuted on Broadway in 2003 and has never been played by an authentically disabled actress. Bode broke that trend with her feature debut. Chu, 45, and his team created a “safe space” to allow her to “be vulnerable” on camera, she tells PEOPLE.
“I know there is a way to make maybe not everything, but a lot of things accessible if you really want to, and if you really ask the right questions of people with disabilities,” says Bode. “Representation is not the only thing that will save us as disabled people. We need community. We need people without disabilities to make their spaces accessible.”
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(Left-Right:) Jonathan Bailey, Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Ethan Slater and Jon M. Chu at the New York premiere of ‘Wicked: Part One’ on November 14
Related: PEOPLE Bad Problem goes behind the scenes: Ariana Grande hid candy in her costume, Cynthia Erivo baked cookies (Exclusive)
“If part 1 is about choices, part 2 is about consequences,” Chu said Entertainment weekly in a recent interview teasing the next episode. Characters – presumably including Nessarose and Elphaba – will “ask, ‘Is this the right decision you made?’”
Bad: Part One is in theaters now, with Part two scheduled for November 26, 2025. Take a look behind the scenes of Bad with the new special issue of PEOPLE, available here.
