In October, buzz about the casting for the role of the Cowardly Lion in the upcoming Wicked: For Good film made headlines. The voice actor bringing the role to life is none other than out Black gay actor and fashion icon Colman Domingo.
Domingo’s casting has made the Wicked cinematic universe, if possible, even gayer. The first Wicked film boasted a cast full of out LGBTQ actors, including legend of the screen and stage Cynthia Erivo, 2025’s Sexiest Man Alive Jonathan Bailey, and Saturday Night Live icon Bowen Yang. The Wicked film (and its press tour) spawned countless memes imagining the not-so-subtextually queer relationship between the two besties at the center of the film, Elphaba and Glinda, played by Erivo and Ariana Grande.
As Christina Tucker wrote last year, Wicked has been very gay from the beginning. The Gregory Macguire novel, from which the stage musical and films are adapted, provides backstory for the LGBTQ cultural touchstone The Wizard of Oz. Christina summed it up the queerness of the 1939 The Wizard of Oz film well:
“It’s easy to point at the sole presence of Judy Garland and say ‘case closed, a gay film was made here today.’ But everything about the story of the Wizard of Oz tracks neatly to a queer reading, pretty much from the moment Dorothy is stuck at a crossroads and the Scarecrow reminds her ‘Of course, some people go both ways.’ Plus, it’s the story of a ragtag group of misfits traveling, who all discover they are fine the way they are; they just have to believe in themselves. Dorothy leaves a drab farm life to hang out in a technicolor city and gets a pair of cute shoes — a coming out for the ages! ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ is so obvious I don’t even need to say more than the title, do I?”
Domingo’s casting highlights an often overlooked aspect of the film’s queerness: the character of the Cowardly Lion. The Lion is more than just one of the “friends of Dorothy.” In performance, dialogue, and storyline, the Cowardly Lion has always been queer.
When Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow first meet the Cowardly Lion on the yellow brick road in the 1939 film, he puts on a performative bluster to intimidate the trio before revealing he lacks the courage of other lions.
The Lion’s song, “If I Only Had the Nerve,” includes coded references to the queerness of his predicament. Lines like “Yeah, it’s sad, believe me, Missy / When you’re born to be a sissy / Without the vim and verve” and “I’m afraid there’s no denyin’ / I’m just a dandelion / A fate I don’t deserve” describe lion’s effeminate masculinity. When the lion calls himself a “dandelion,” he makes a limp wrist motion with his right arm, a gesture referring to gay modes of embodiment. As he sings the words “missy” and “sissy,” he emphasizes the sibilant “esses,” a stereotype of gay speech patterns. Actor Bret Lahr’s performance in the role is key: He plays the lion like a drama king (or queen), enhancing its queer resonance.
I chatted with Hollis Griffin, an Associate Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, about the Cowardly Lion’s role in LGBTQ culture and history.
“His softness, his retreating nature, his wimpiness, for lack of a better way of saying it, gets coded on gendered terms as a failure of masculinity. There’s a way that a failure of masculinity reads queerly,” Griffin said. “I, of course, love the lion for that reason. I love the theater of it, I love the excess of it.”
It would be easy to read this representation as homophobic — and many viewers have. The Cowardly Lion’s queerness is played for laughs, the butt of the joke. His self-deprecating song seems to indicate an internalized self-hatred rather than pride in his difference. But many LGBTQ viewers, like Griffin, have read this character against the grain. Griffin shared:
“I played the Cowardly Lion in the eighth grade, which was a hugely formative experience for me. I think back to my particular relationship with theater — I was a closeted gay preteen. Theater was a place where I could step into something and be different. I could be recognized and validated for being different. I understood the performance as a way to try different things on, and a way of being in my body and in my life in different ways.”
Or as gay film scholar Alexander Doty writes, “Sometime in my twenties, I became aware of butches and camp, which fed into my growing ‘gay’ appreciation of The Wizard of Oz. Camp finally let me make my peace with the Cowardly Lion…King of the forest? He was more like a drag queen who didn’t give a fuck. Because of this, he seemed to have a bravery that the narrative insisted he lacked.”
Read as drag, the Cowardly Lion’s performance calls gender norms into question. As Dee Michel and James Satter put it, “Lahr’s performance is so hammy, so over the top, that he draws attention in every scene he’s in. In addition, his campiness and flamboyance demonstrate how silly masculinity is; it is something created by society, not an innate quality…The Cowardly Lion is made aware of both the significance and constructedness of masculinity itself by taking the journey through Oz.”
In the 1978 musical film The Wiz, another adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that reimagines the story in the context of Black history, culture, and music, the Cowardly Lion is similarly coded queerly. Ted Ross, who plays the Lion in the film (and originated the role in the stage musical), channels Lahr’s performance by embodying the character with an over the top bluster, theatricality, and sass in his song “I’m a Mean Ol’ Lion.” He soon “comes out” to Dorothy and friends in a telling scene, where he confesses, “I thought I’d be safe here, no one would discover my terrible secret. That I’m a lion without any courage!” Ross’s take on the Cowardly Lion puts a 1970s spin on it: The Lion’s confession would read queerly in an era in which coming out became a political act of gay liberation. The character’s soulful attitude adds a Black queer resonance to the Cowardly Lion, placing Black LGBTQ subculture in the center of the story.
What will Domingo’s performance as the Cowardly Lion in Wicked look like? Will it retain or reference the queerness of Lahr’s and Ross’s performances? This remains to be seen. It’s worth noting that the character’s role is much less central in the story of Wicked, at least in the stage musical version.
“One of the things that I’m hopeful for, however this story unfolds, and however you code the particular transformation that this character goes through, is that it’s done with nuance and care,” Griffin tells me. “Culture is still the place where meaningful conversations about who we are and how we are in the world take place. It’s still a shared point of reference from which ideas emerge about how to do, and be, and want.”
One way to have this meaningful conversation is to see where we’ve come from in order to help us imagine where we’re going. The yellow brick road to the Emerald City is paved with LGBTQ history and culture. I can’t wait to see how Colman Domingo’s Cowardly Lion eases on down this version of the mythic story.
