There is a kind of return only a hometown can stage. When the BFI London Film Festival named Cynthia Erivo among the artists it will seat for an on-stage Screen Talk this autumn, the trades filed it as one more marquee name on a crowded slate — a line between Andrew Scott and Jesse Eisenberg. Read from Stockwell, where she was born, it is closer to a circle closing: the city that trained her receiving back one of the most decorated performers of her generation.

The wire framing — Oscar-nominated, star of Wicked — flattens the more interesting fact, which is that Erivo is not a screen creation at all but a stage animal who was built, deliberately and slowly, before a camera ever found her. She came up through the theatre and through the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and it shows in the thing she does that no franchise can manufacture: she treats the voice as an instrument and the body as an argument, holding a note or a silence until it means something. That discipline is the through-line the lineup blurb erases, and it is the real subject of any honest conversation about her.

It also explains the peculiar suspense she carries onto a festival stage. Erivo holds a Tony, won for her shattering Celie in the 2016 Broadway revival of The Color Purple; a Grammy for that cast recording, and a second for her Wicked duet with Ariana Grande; and a Daytime Emmy. She is, in other words, a single statuette — an Academy Award — from the EGOT, and she has stood at that threshold three times without crossing it, twice for Harriet and once for Elphaba. Few performers arrive at a career retrospective with the ledger so nearly complete and so pointedly open.

What has changed since her last London homecoming is scale. Elphaba turned a respected actor into a box-office engine: Wicked: For Good opened to the biggest debut ever recorded for a Broadway adaptation and became one of the defining commercial events of its year. That success is the tension a Screen Talk should press on, not smooth over — the pull between the Menier Chocolate Factory rigour she was formed by and the green-skinned, globe-spanning machine she now fronts. The most illuminating version of Erivo is neither the prestige-theatre purist nor the tentpole star, but the performer negotiating, in real time, what one costs the other.

The festival has built a slate designed to invite exactly that kind of self-examination. Screen Talks bring artists onstage to trace craft rather than plug a release, and this year’s roster is deep — Sofia Coppola, Mahershala Ali, John Malkovich, Ava DuVernay, Danny Boyle and more, the conversations carried on BFI Player and the festival’s YouTube channel for anyone outside the room. Andrew Scott opens the festival playing Ian Charleson in Elsinore; Eisenberg closes it as the director of The Debut. Erivo sits at the centre of that constellation not as the biggest name but as the one whose story is least finished.

The talk runs during the festival’s 70th edition, at BFI Southbank, across the October dates the programme has now locked. Strip away the red carpet and what remains is simpler and stranger: a woman who left Stockwell to learn how to hold a room, coming back to a London stage to talk about how she does it — one gold figure away from having nothing left to win.

Tags: Cynthia Erivo, Wicked, EGOT, London Film Festival, screen talks