I haven’t seen the full Wicked stage play, but I was already well aware of the twists and turns we’d see in Wicked: For Good. The musical sequel covers the events of the play’s second act, and it includes several direct ties to the original Wizard of Oz story. As such, I was braced for it to reveal the brainless Scarecrow, but I was not prepared for how the guy would actually look when on screen, and neither were most people, it seems, as the reveal has caught fans off guard.
In the Wicked continuity, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey, People’s Sexiest Man Alive), the carefree prince who starts growing a conscious after he meets Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), becomes the Scarecrow. He starts off as a dashing, charismatic narcissist, but as Fiyero grows to care for Elphaba and her battle for animal rights, he turns against the Wizard’s fascist regime and becomes a fugitive with the Wicked Witch.
Later in the film, he is captured by the Wizard’s guards and tortured. Elphaba, desperate to save her lover, casts a spell to keep him from dying or feeling any pain. We don’t see Fiyero’s face for almost the entirety of the second half of the movie because For Good goes out of its way to obscure it and hide his identity, but we unknowingly see the back of his head a few times. That’s because Elphaba’s spell turned him into the Scarecrow who accompanies Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
We don’t actually see Fiyero as the Scarecrow until the final moments of For Good, and while an eagle-eyed Wizard of Oz fan may have caught onto this twist when he was strung up on a cross in a cornfield during Elphaba’s spell, plenty of first-time viewers were genuinely shocked by this reveal, not only because of Fiyero’s dark fate, but because Bailey straight up looks like a patched together version of Ryan Reynolds in his Scarecrow look.
My entire theater burst out laughing when they saw the Scarecrow’s design
— 5 DAYS UNTIL DON CHEADLE’S BIRTHDAY (@Schaffrillas) November 21, 2025
out mogged the wicked for good scarecrow pic.twitter.com/CHKems9MTo
— 👹 (@tummyhxrts) November 22, 2025
also happy to report fiyero looks chopped asf as the scarecrow like even tin man boq is out mugging him pic.twitter.com/lrDdCGEHAQ
— gelphie conquers all (@aIicentinchains) November 18, 2025
While some might be unsettled by Fiyero’s new face, others aren’t going to let some straw and burlap keep them from recreating that one scene from Pearl. Others are praising Wicked: For Good’s use of practical makeup and effects to pull off the Scarecrow’s look, as well as Ethan Slater’s take on the film’s terrifying, revenge-crazed Tin Man.
the worst part of that fiyerocrow spoiler is that he looks so weird in the pic i thought he was UGLY and HE’S NOT????
— laura (@leaftraveler_4) November 21, 2025
let’s not forget that the scarecrow and tin man in wicked: for good were prosthetics and makeup… incredible!!! pic.twitter.com/7SCCM80vvz
— lauren (@hoenymoomavenue) November 21, 2025
WHAT IF THIS WAS MY LAST STRAW pic.twitter.com/S601Afz67S
— julie⁷ is still defending fiyeraba (@juliesayit) November 23, 2025
It would have been a bit of a copout if Fiyero’s Scarecrow look was pretty much just Bailey’s face with a filter on it. I have a lot of issues with Wicked’s paper-thin connective tissue between the show and the Wizard of Oz story, but I have to give the crew props for making its transformed leading men appropriately horrifying. Nevertheless, thirst finds a way.
