With the Land of Oz in the rearview, Cynthia Erivo is changing up her screen persona… for good. The Tony-winning and Oscar-nominated British thespian headlines another stage-to-screen adaptation that’s bound for theaters — and potentially the awards race after its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International film Festival on Sunday night.
Erivo takes center stage in Prima Facie, the feature film version of Suzie Miller‘s acclaimed legal drama that earned multiple Oliviers and Tonys during its respective London and Broadway runs. And while the Susanna White-directed film isn’t a musical, Erivo still found a way to bring some of her Wicked experience in that department to the fore.
“I thought of the musicality of her,” the actress told the TIFF crowd — which awarded her a standing ovation when she first emerged onstage after the credits rolled — referring to her onscreen alter ego, Tessa Ensler, a prominent London barrister. “When I watched barristers at work, I realized how much music there is in the way they approach people [in court] and they way they talk. I wanted to give her that power to be able to speak with a musicality that drew people in or pushed people out.”
And unlike in the two-part Wicked movie, the first half of which earned her a Best Actress nomination, Erivo didn’t have to undergo an elaborate transformation to get into character. The actress made a point of incorporating her signature tattoos and piercings into the role as a way to spotlight Tessa’s humanity. “The piercings are still in, and you can see the tattoos,” Erivo emphasized. “Those are the questions I asked the barrister: How much [of this] can I have? And they said, ‘You can have all of it — but up to this point.’
“I wanted to keep all those details that make her [who she is] to the point where you can watch her throughout the film and see the breakdown of when she loses it and has to build it back up again,” Erivo added. “You can see the journey of her going from one end of the spectrum to the other. You meet her as Tessa the barrister — and then you meet her as Tessa.”
Onstage at least, that’s a journey that Tessa went on alone. Miller wrote the play as a one woman show that starred Killing Eve‘s Jodie Comer, who won statuettes for her performance on both sides of the pond. Ensler begins the story as a young barrister on the rise, building her reputation by prosecuting sexual assault cases. But after she’s raped by a male colleague, Tessa finds herself on the stand and comes face-to-face with a legal system that’s practically designed to discourage sexual assault survivors from reporting what they’ve experienced.
Trained as a human rights lawyer, Miller based Prima Facie on actual statements she took from women who had been sexually assaulted — many of whom never saw justice in court. “I recognized that when it comes to sexual assault, the law really does let women down,” the writer noted. “They’re treated as a if they’re a complainant that needs to be cross-examined, because it’s assumed that they’re lying.
“Rape is the only crime where an accusation can mean that a woman still had a lived experience of rape even if the man doesn’t acknowledge that it happened or even if they believed they weren’t raping someone,” Miller continued. “That lived experience is sometimes a re-trauma when it comes to the court system, and the court system is supposed to be build for everyone. It’s not supposed to victimize someone within its system. We made the law, we should interrogate it, and tell it to catch up with society.”
In adapting the play to the screen, White and Miller opened up its world — and its cast — by populating the film with locations and characters that had previously only been alluded to onstage. They also cut substantial amounts of dialogue, a process that White acknowledges took some time. “The first draft was full of dialogue,” recalled the Emmy-nominated director whose credits include adaptations of Bleak House and Jane Eyre as well as the HBO series Generation Kill. “So I had to be sure that Suzie really wanted to take a big leap and make it something cinematic; to go from the monologue to something that really tells the story visually. Oftentimes, the best scenes don’t require dialogue at all.”
But the movie version of Prima Facie returns to its stage roots in the final act, which takes place entirely in the courtroom as Tessa takes the stand and genuinely struggles through her testimony. Erivo said that she embraced the “moment-by-moment” theatrical feeling of that extended sequence, which was shot in multiple long takes over a period of many days.
“There are moments where I’m shifting my weight from one foot to the other because I really was tired,” she recalled. “That’s a growing process for Tessa. She has to realize the thing that she’s been doing to other people is not the same as the thing she’s experiencing [on the stand]. And then she has to reckon with that in real time.”
Placed in an awards context, one analogue for Prima Facie would be 2022’s She Said, Maria Schrader’s dramatization of how New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor exposed film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault. That movie debuted to strong reviews at the New York Film Festival and earned awards and nominations from a number of critics’ groups, as well as the AARP, and the BAFTAs, but never cracked the Oscar race.
The main hope for Prima Facie would be a third Best Actress nod for Erivo, who is entering a race that’s currently led by The Debut‘s Julianne Moore and Obsessions‘s Inde Navarrette. While she’s currently sitting at No. 40 on Gold Derby’s experts-only leaderboard, the combined odds have her considerably higher at No. 10 behind Misty Green‘s Rosalind Eleazar, who also launched her Best Actress campaign at TIFF.
Best Actress
1.
2.
3.
Inde Navarrette
Obsession
4.
Sandra Hüller
Fatherland
5.
6.
Ruth Madeley
Being Heumann
7.
Virginie Efira
All of a Sudden
8.
Rosalind Eleazar
Misty Green
9.
10.
Cynthia Erivo
Prima Facie
Notably, Eleazar and Erivo are the highest-ranked Black performers among the current contenders, with Zendaya behind them at No. 18 for The Drama. The category’s checkered history with recognizing women of color has been much-discussed over the years, with Halle Berry remaining the lone Black actress to win the statuette. That’s an issue that will continue to be interrogated even after voters render their verdict on Prima Facie in the months ahead.
People’s Choice Award
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
8.
9.
10.
