With the news of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo being cast as Glinda and Elphaba in the upcoming film adaptation of “Wicked” hanging in the air, there are still some gaps to fill within the rest of the cast to make the movie come to life.
With only two of the roles officially cast, actor Calvin Seabrooks cleverly imagined Billy Porter auditioning for one of the open roles: Madame Morrible. In the short sketch shared across his social media profiles, Seabrooks tackled the character's introduction to “The Wizard and I,” performing the tune while doing a spot-on impression of Porter.
“Many years I have waited for a gift like yours to appear,” Seabrooks sang, nailing Porter’s unique inflections while subbing in a few lyrics for creative liberty “Why, I predict the Wizard might make you his magic grand vizier! My dear, my dear, I’ll write at once to the Wizard. Tell him of you in advance. With a talent like yours, b—ch, there is defint-ish chance if you work as you should. You'll be making good.”
After holding the note on “good” for a few seconds, Seabrooks did a dramatic tongue click before adding one last word in character: “Sweetie!”
The 33-year-old from Los Angeles shared the short 45-second clip across Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, where it has cumulatively amassed over 400,000 views and is growing in popularity by the hour. So much so that Seabrooks decided to make a follow-up video to the audition, acting out what Porter’s callback would look like for the movie-musical.
This time in the clip, which has well over 200,000 cumulative views, Seabrooks took on “I’m Not That Girl” from “Wicked,” originally sung by Elphaba in the musical. The actor put Porter’s spin on the tender tune, using spot-on inflection and downright hilarious runs to perfect the rendition of the tune.
Fans had an overwhelmingly positive response for Seabrooks, flooding the comments section of the post on each platform with love.
On TikTok, one commenter loved the idea of Porter joining the “Wicked” cast, writing, “Wait no but Billy Porter as the Wizard would be kind of a serve.”
“You think you can just insert live footage of Billy’s audition and we wouldn’t notice?” another fan commented, pointing out the accuracy of the impression.
“WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THE TONGUE POP AT THE END!?? AND THE SEAMLESS VIBRATO, USING THE POP AS A CONSONANT OMG GENIUS,” one fan tweeted.
Another fan didn’t even need to hear Seabrooks’ impression to know it was good, writing on Twitter, “this was muted when i watched it and he still nailed it.”
Seabrooks told TODAY that he has been a fan of Porter since he was 15-years-old, citing “Beauty School Dropout” from the 1994 “Grease” revival as his first foray into becoming a fan.
“His vocals are next level,” Seabrooks said. “So I always, just as a singer, kind of emulated him for such a long time, just how he approaches everything. But then just because he’s such an incredible performance and comedic powerhouse, as a comedian, I was interested in listening to every inflection that he does."
"He has such an incredible, unique, really raspy tone and there’s just certain things that he does that are just so uniquely Billy Porter," Seabrooks continued. "He has so many mannerisms and so many inflections.”
Seabrooks said he had been “quietly” doing his Porter impression for himself for about 10 years before finally deciding to share it with the internet.
Once it was announced that Erivo and Grande had been cast in the “Wicked” movie, the actor said he knew he wanted to do something surrounding the news. Inspired by Porter’s own performance in 2021's “Cinderella” as the Fairy Godmother and Madame Morrible’s evil persona cut from a similar cloth, Seabrooks thought it would be “hilarious” and “incredible” for Porter to play the part.
The actor said the feedback from people online has been overwhelmingly positive, especially from big fans of Porter who are happy to see him get mainstream recognition.
“It’s just been really cool to see people that he’s touched in his career, obviously myself included,” Seabrooks said.
He explained, “The incredible things that he's given to me, just in being able to see an incredible Black, queer, femme performer…he's such an icon to me.”
Seabrooks described himself as a theater kid in high school who had grown up listening to show-tunes and watching movies every single weekend at the theater his aunt was a manager at. It was there that he was able to feel like he was “transported” from his own life and “dream big.”
“Being able to just do that for other people is a gift,” he said. “Obviously there's so much negativity going around in our world, but it's just nice to be able to let people escape for like, a minute, because sometimes it really just takes a minute to get out of it.”