After a long wait, we finally know who plays Dorothy in Wicked: For Good, but we still have plenty of questions about her character — why wasn’t her face shown and where are the ruby slippers?
Dorothy appeared briefly in Wicked, but no actor was credited for the role, meaning we had to wait until the 2025 sequel to finally find out who plays the iconic main character from The Wizard of Oz.
In Wicked: For Good, Dorothy is played by Bethany Weaver, a British stage actress, choreographer, and Pilates instructor. The actress is named in the credits and celebrated her role in a November 23 Instagram post, writing, “This has been a life changing experience, it’s changed me in so many ways and most importantly, for good. It’s been an honour to carry the legacy of the brilliant women before me who have stepped into these shoes, and embarked on the yellow brick road. I hope I have made them proud.”
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However, as those who’ve seen the film know, Weaver’s face is never actually seen on screen. This is a very intentional choice by director Jon M. Chu. In the original Broadway musical, Dorothy is never seen on stage and isn’t a central character in Elphaba and Glinda’s story.
In Chu’s version, Dorothy is seen but never shown face-on. “She’s in [the movies] more than in the [Broadway] show, but I want to keep her a mystery because I want everyone’s Dorothy to be their Dorothy,” he explained to Elle in October. “I don’t want to step on that. Plus, if you saw her face, you’d want to know more about her—and it’s not about Dorothy. I think people will be happy. You get a little bit more of that story that supports the main plot, but it’s about the girls [Elphaba and Glinda].”
This isn’t the only change Wicked: For Good made to our typical vision of Dorothy Gale. When you picture Dorothy, the magical ruby red slippers Judy Garland wore in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz probably come to mind. However, in Wicked: For Good, Dorothy wears silver slippers for two fascinating reasons.
The first reason for Dorothy’s silver slippers is that in the original 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, author L. Frank Baum wrote the shoes to be silver.
Judy Garland’s red slippers, which are the most valuable piece of film memorabilia of all time, were added to the 1939 film amid the excitement about having color on screens for the first time. However, Wicked: For Good, Academy Award-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell decided to go back to the book’s roots for his vision of the slippers.
There’s also another reason, though, and that’s all about copyright issues. Though Baum’s books are public domain, the 1939 film still isn’t, so Wicked’s creators had to be careful about using any details that exclusively belong to the film.
“For this, we weren’t able to re-create the original film look that Judy Garland wore, and I wasn’t particularly interested in that,” Tazewell told Harper’s Bazaar in November. “I used a silhouette of a little girl’s dress from the turn of the century, created in blue gingham, which is very specific to the Dorothy image that we know.”
