Cynthia Erivo is doing a lot of press to promote her turn as Elphaba in Wicked. And in addition to always showing up for her interviews wearing an outrageously fierce outfit, the singer/actress is also sporting her signature long, lacquered fingernails.
Which brings us to this week’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, in which the actor asked Erivo the one question he thought everyone was dying to ask, but only he was uncouth enough to actually throw out there: how do you wipe with those long nails?
“Can I see your hands?” Shepard asked Erivo. “I couldn’t tell if it was your nails were so long or if you were wearing some kind of hand thing.” Once Erivo assured him that nothing was going on with her hands and that she just naturally has “very long fingers” and that her nails happen to be “very long” right now, the Buddy Games star wondered if he could ask a “really crazy question [that’s] inappropriate.”
“Go on,” Erivo told him.
“When you’re wiping your butt…” he began as Erivo laughed, “I knew you would ask that question.”
“Everyone’s afraid to ask it,” Shepard responded. “No, no one’s afraid to ask it!” Erivo responded. “Everybody asks that question, and my answer is nobody uses just their fingers to wipe their backside. You use tissue, correct? And you wipe!”
“I guess my question is does the tissue go on the tip of the fingernails or do you try to get the tissue…,” Shepard asked, getting into the nitty gritty of the toileting habits of the actress who is an Oscar short of becoming an EGOT winner.
“Pads of the fingers,” Erivo confirmed.
“Great, great, great, we’re getting somewhere,” a somewhat embarrassed-sounding Shepard responded as he tried to get things back on track before his baser instincts bubbled up one more time. “And then you’re just feeling a little tickle of the nails on the crack of your butt sometimes?”
Erivo once again promised him that that was not the case, because the tissue is on the job, which led to Shepard — who said in 2021 that he and wife Kristen Bell sometimes don’t bathe their daughters for “five, six days” — proposing that if he had such formidable talons he would wrap his whole hand in TP to make a kind of bathroom “mitten.”
Showing remarkable patience, Erivo explained, “I fold.” Saying she was not offended by the question, but rather “annoyed,” she added, “I get it, but also, I’m a functioning adult and I’ve never walked around smelling like… you know… Here’s the thing, there are people who do not have nails who need to check how they’re wiping.”
The first part of Wicked opens in theaters on Friday (Nov. 22).
Listen to Erivo talk about nailing it in the loo below.
