Wickie Roy isn’t really named Wickie Roy. “I wouldn’t be surprised if her actual name is Tamika or something,” says Renée Elise Goldsberry, who plays the character on Peacock’s delightful comedy Girls5eva. “Some name that you’ve heard a lot of times.”
But a common moniker wouldn’t do for a prima donna like Wickie—somebody who once made love to Ja Rule atop an invisible piano, who pronounces “Arizona” with a lisping Spanish s, who claims, correctly, that her mouth is a T-shirt gun of wisdom. “I think she 100% decided when she was looking in the mirror, making sounds, that Wickie Roy was her name, because she liked the way her mouth looked when she says it,” Goldsberry explains, confessing in a very Wickie way that she came up with that bit of backstory herself: “I’ve made this decision. No one told me this.”
That’s Wickie for you—bold, self-centered, more than a little ridiculous. She was the “fierce one” in the Y2K–era girl group that gives the show its title, a diva deferred who’s been clawing for the fame she believes she deserves since the group’s second album, featuring a single called “Quit Flying Planes at My Heart,” tanked. (It was released September 10, 2001.)
In the wrong hands, Wickie might have been a strident monster—or, worse, a one-note narcissist, the grown-up version of a Disney Channel sitcom’s vain villainess. But in the captivatingly off-kilter world of Girls5eva, she’s a true original, the sort of character who could plausibly replace her boot’s broken heel with an empty cola bottle and totally pull the look off.
“I always thought of her as Beyoncé who never became Beyoncé,” says Girls5eva creator Meredith Scardino. “In any group, there’s always a star—somebody that has everything, the total package. And I think Wickie was that person in Girls5eva.” The character was influenced by a few real-life divas—Mariah Carey; Patti LuPone, whose infamous 2009 onstage outburst inspired a key Wickie storyline—but mostly, Scardino saw her as a comically rich archetype: “Wickie’s got tons of talent, but she also takes herself very seriously at times. And that’s always very fun to play with.” Some members of Girls5eva saw the group itself as an end. Wickie saw it “as a stepping stone: Okay, I’m in this group, but I’m going to end up being a big solo star.”
That, of course, didn’t happen, despite Wickie’s best efforts. Before reuniting with her old bandmates—down-to-earth mom Dawn (Sara Bareilles), sweet Real Housewives wannabe Summer (Busy Philipps), and no-nonsense dentist Gloria (Paula Pell)—she’s spent the better part of two decades scraping for any crumb of notoriety she can get: releasing a sultry solo album called Yesternights, making a terrible movie with a drag-clad José Canseco, starring in a “pastiche of the Jim Carrey oeuvre” called The Maskical: The Musical.
Fifty-year-old Goldsberry, who’s been hustling since the ’90s herself, can relate. Before her breakout role in Hamiton in the mid-2010s, “I was throwing a lot of things against the wall, as they say. I was auditioning for things; I was writing music, trying to get a record deal; I had a band that was playing in the clubs in the L.A. area; I was singing on Ally McBeal; and I sang a lot of voiceover work for different movies or films.” At one point, the future Tony winner even joined a girl group of her own: “We were not trying to just look good. We could all really sing. And we decided that we were going to come together and make it happen as a foursome. It didn’t work out.” Funnily enough, she tells me, she can’t actually remember what the group was called. (After we speak, The New York Times figures it out: Fe-Male.)
So Wickie spoke to her—even though Goldsberry is much more of a team player than her alter ego. “It’s always strategically important for me to make good friends so they help me out,” she says. “Wickie didn’t get the memo. She was not trying to make friends and influence people—she was trying to be a star.”
Perhaps it’s no wonder that Scardino had Goldsberry in mind for the role from the jump. Girls5eva executive producer Tina Fey had worked with the actor previously in the 2015 movie Sisters, and knew that even though she hadn’t done much straight comedy, Goldsberry had laser precision and a great ability to improvise. Scardino was sold once she saw Goldsberry starring opposite Pell in an instant-classic 2019 episode of Documentary Now—and even more so during a key moment in Girls5eva’s pilot.
Dawn, the Felix to Wickie’s Oscar, has just learned that her former bandmate’s life isn’t really as glamorous as it appears on Instagram. Wickie confesses that she was dropped by her label long ago, but never gave up hope on achieving “the lifestyle I am owed because of the voice God put in my mouth!” She sings those last six words in a wild melisma that’s equal parts overblown and impressive, and ends pointing at the incredible mouth in question.
“Because Renée just spent so much of her career doing dramatic work, we didn’t know how hilarious she was when she just burst into song,” Scardino says. “So during our first table read, when we heard that, the writers and I were like, We gotta give her more opportunities to do things like that.”
Goldsberry also found that moment illuminating, and weirdly humanizing—a critical moment of vulnerability for a larger-than-life creation like Wickie. “I think everybody understands how cancerous a gift can be unfulfilled, unaccomplished,” she says. “And so I think she gets a little leeway. I think she gets forgiven for a lot of mistakes because we recognize that. And, most importantly, she recognizes very early on that she is not an island, and she needs to figure out how to love other people.”
The character clicked even further when Goldsberry began to work with the show’s hair, makeup, and costume design teams. “Before I had the opportunity to play Wickie,” says Goldsberry, “I was very controlling about anybody that was trying to style me because I wanted to look very natural and I wanted to be fresh-faced and young.” For Girls5eva, though, she took a leap, asking only that her character look different every time she appeared onscreen—a challenge costume designer Tina Nigro happily embraced.
Nigro figured that present-day Wickie’s financial trouble meant she couldn’t afford much designer gear. “She doesn’t have money, but she has got good style,” Nigro says. “She kind of reworks pieces that she has to make them look modern”—pairing, say, a big T-shirt with red thigh-high boots and wearing it as a dress. Pieces like Wickie’s gold leather motorcycle jacket and ridiculous platform heels nod toward her past as a Jennifer Lopez wannabe, while her affinity for big shoulders communicates her need to stand out. Goldsberry loved the look so much that she wound up getting her hair cut in the style of one of Wickie’s (more understated) wigs—and managed to make it through eight episodes of sky-high shoes before promptly turning her ankle the moment season one wrapped.
In the flashback sequences, Wickie and her bandmates can usually be found in matchy, Destiny’s Child–esque ensembles. (Wickie’s, of course, tend to be the sexiest, but not even Bareilles’s girl-next-door Dawn escapes midriff-bearing and miniskirts.) It’s a skillful rendering of a time when countless young women were sexualized under the guise of empowerment, told what to wear and what to sing by a sexist industry that viewed them as an endlessly renewable resource. Goldsberry experienced it herself during her brief stint with Fe-Male. At the time, she thought the single her girl group was trying to release “was the greatest song ever. I knew it was a hit.” The lyrics, as she remembers them: “Yes you can / Find you a good man / But when you do / You got to treat him right.”
It’s only a hop, skip, and a jump away from “Dream Girlfriend,” a pointed Girls5eva track about a proto–Cool Girl that Goldsberry calls “obnoxiously irresponsible.” (It’s also one of her favorites.) “Got big doe eyes that you can swim in / Love watching stand-up, but not by women / Runnin’ in pumps, never taking dumps / And my feet are a child size four.”
By the time season one ends, Wickie and her cohort have finally escaped that exploitative machine and achieved a modicum of success on their own terms. “I like keeping them scrappy but encouraged,” says Scardino. “I love writing underdog characters, people that try and fail and go up against big machines. So I didn’t want them to end season one as, like, four J.Los on top of the world.” There’s plenty of room for the gang to keep failing upwards in Girls5eva’s recently announced second season, which will further flesh out Scardino’s wacky universe and, hopefully, reveal more about Wickie’s personal life.
“We had some ideas about the family, and we had a story about her mom that I really wanted to put into the season but couldn’t get to,” Scardino says. Could it be that Mama Roy is even more over-the-top than Wickie herself? We won’t have to wait five-ever to find out.
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