Marissa Bode Is Defying Expectations

Marissa Bode is feeling sentimental. She’s at the tail end of a whirlwind press tour for Wicked: For Good, which has sent her to events across London and New York and signals the end of her time in Oz. “It’s just a press tour, but it’s still saying goodbye in and of itself,” she says as she settles into our table at Midtown’s Jams.

Professionally, the 25-year-old actor has hardly known a world outside of Wicked. She moved to Los Angeles to attend a performing arts school after spending her childhood in small-town Wisconsin, acting in community theater productions. Not too long after graduation, she booked her first feature film with Wicked, landing the part of Nessarose Thropp — the first part she’d seen herself in as a wheelchair user. (At 11, she caught a touring production: “That was the first time I had ever seen a character in a wheelchair on stage.”)

She recalls the audition process with both fondness and mild embarrassment. After convincing herself she’d lost out on the part, she made a short film “about turning your bad luck into good luck” and shared it on Instagram, which caught the attention of Wicked director Jon M. Chu. “Literally, a few days later, they had me for another callback over Zoom,” she recalls. “I’m just talking to Jon about my character, then he stopped and was like, ‘So I saw that video you posted on social media,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I ruined it.’’”

Chu acknowledged that she shouldn’t have hinted at auditioning for Wicked publicly — but he wasn’t there to punish her. “Mind you, at the end of the short film, you hear a knock at the door, and it cuts to black,” she says. “He opens his door, and it’s Ari[ana Grande] and Cynthia [Erivo] with a sign that says, ‘Welcome to Oz. Will you be our Nessarose?’”

“I was a deer in headlights,” she says, recreating her wide-eyed, stunned reaction for my amusement. The happy tears came right after, when she told her parents.

Though Bode has always had a soft spot for the character, Nessarose has long been a controversial figure for fans of the Broadway musical, in part due to how she turns against her sister, Elphaba, and because of how her disability is depicted onstage. But Bode believes the film addresses both critiques: For Good, which expands the musical’s second act with new material, provides more context for what she jokingly calls Nessarose’s “dictator era” (IYKYK); and while on Broadway Nessarose guilts Elphaba into magicking away her disability, the film takes a different tack.

Instead of wishing to walk again, Nessarose simply dreams of reliving her Shiz days — which inspires Elphaba to grant her the gift of flight. (Superfans will catch the nod to the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” in which Elphaba sings “everyone deserves a chance to fly.”) “It’s a stereotype that people with disabilities are victims of their disability, or that’s the main focus of their story,” she says. “Nessa is so much more than that.”

Bode is the first disabled actor to play Nessarose, who’d previously been portrayed by an able-bodied actor using a wheelchair onstage. But after Bode’s casting, that’s changed: Jenna Bainbridge became the first wheelchair user to play the role on Broadway in February 2025. “It gives me hope for the future,” Bode says. She hopes the films and the stage production will start conversations about casting more disabled actors. “I would love casting to just remember to keep an open mind and ask the question of ‘Why not?’” she says. “Why shouldn’t this character be disabled? Or does it really matter that much to the story if this character is played by a disabled person?”

Bode regularly turns to TikTok to advocate for people with disabilities, but her outspokenness isn’t just online. In between bites of her eggplant parm, she becomes passionate about everything from the lack of accessibility in London, where Wicked filmed (“It’s frustrating when they say ‘They’re old buildings.’ Nobody said you had to tear the building down. Just add a ramp.”), to which Wicked characters are queer (“Everybody in my brain is.”), to the red carpet crasher who ambushed Grande at the film’s Singapore premiere.

“It was a thing of wanting to get content, which is so gross and just horrible,” she says. “It feels almost like a lose-lose situation. If we set boundaries, we’re often called rude and we have a bad attitude. But if we say yes to everything, we’re forced to be in a position where we potentially feel uncomfortable.”

It’s no wonder why Bode and her castmates are ready for a break after the night before’s New York premiere. “I’m so glad that everyone will get a chance to sleep,” she quips, sipping on her pineapple-infused mocktail.

As a self-professed “chronically online” TikToker, Bode is the first to poke fun at herself, but she will always speak up when she feels targeted, like when her pronunciation of “Boq” in “Dancing Through Life” became a meme on TikTok last December. At first, she embraced the harmless joke, reposting edits of songs like Charli XCX’s “B2b” remixed as “Boq2Boq.” But soon, it turned more sinister, as people started criticizing her mannerisms and simply used “BOQ” (in all caps) as a punchline in the comments section, dismissing whatever she spoke about.

“The video where I was saying ‘Please don't wish violence on disabled people,’ or talking about things like Palestine, people were spamming [‘BOQ’] in that comment section,” she says. “I eventually filtered it from my comments because it got overwhelming.”

But none of those incidents has put her off show business. As she steals a few french fries from my plate, she ponders her future, stating that she’d love to do comedies, queer movies, and even a “campy horror,” with roles that aren’t specifically written for disabled actors. She wants to write and direct her own stories, too. “I think some of the best art is drawing from experiences,” she says. “Don’t know what it’ll be yet, but [it will be] that.”

As she finishes her meal, Bode wraps up in a fuzzy pink hoodie, bracing herself for the cold before heading back to her hotel for one last fitting. The next day, she’ll wrap up her press obligations and fly back to sunny Los Angeles, where her loved ones are planning a Wicked: For Good viewing party. She hopes they walk away from the movie feeling the same way she did the first time she saw Wicked over a decade ago, as she wishes for every viewer.

“I hope that you see yourself in the film,” she tells me, “and you can take a piece of Oz home with you.”