The Second Coming of Ariana Grande – Hollywood Reporter
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She started on Nickelodeon, before becoming a global pop sensation. Now, Grande is back in Hollywood, and the ‘Wicked’ star has major Oscar buzz — and a whole lot of movie offers.
“I’m sorry,” Ariana Grande says at the first sign of tears collecting in her eyes. She’s apologizing for crying again, but here we are on a late January afternoon, and she is crying again.
“I’m so sorry,” Grande reiterates, aware of how many tears have already been shed and later memed in the making and promotion of Wicked, the $700 million blockbuster adaptation of the Broadway show, itself an adaptation of a novel of the same name.
But the truth is, Grande has been damn near sobbing for weeks now, ever since the Jan. 23 announcement that the 31-year-old pop star has earned an Oscar nomination for her first-ever starring role, one of 10 nods for the prequel to The Wizard of Oz. She can’t help but see it as both invitation and validation from a community that she had watched only from afar until very recently.
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“It’s a beautiful thing to feel like the work that I’m doing or have done is kind of, I suppose, I don’t know, enough or louder or whatever it is,” she says, the lower half of her face covered by a mask, which, of course, is Glinda pink, as she fights off a gnarly head cold she picked up on the unrelenting awards circuit. “This feeling that people are seeing me — like, actually me — it’s so silly because I’ve been seen for so long, but it feels like it’s maybe for the first time and it’s just different.”
On its face, it’s a confusing statement for a woman who has ostensibly performed as herself for more than a decade. That Ariana Grande has earned 18 Grammy nominations, nine Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits and 376 million Instagram followers. But the instantly recognizable ponytail that sits high atop her head or the oversized sweatshirts and sky-high boots that have decorated her pint-sized body, that’s not really her — or, she says, it’s no more her than Glinda is her.
“At a certain point, you get tired of that [pop star] character, because it is a character,” she says amid a rotation of tea and cough drops at the Chateau Marmont. “There are pieces of you and your story that are woven throughout your songwriting, but then, because of the way it travels and becomes sensationalized, it gets away from you. And beneath all of it is just a girl from Boca who loves art, and I think that’s why it’s been such a deeply healing gift to disappear into this character — to take off one mask and put on another.”
In many ways, Glinda is just another character, one who presents as a polished, popular beauty. But much like Grande, there’s trauma and heartache simmering beneath. In fact, she and director Jon M. Chu began exploring those parallels almost immediately upon her casting, a process that ultimately informed their version of Glinda. “She talked a lot about her own life, about playing a character of Ariana Grande, and also growing up at the same time and going through tragedy,” says Chu, alluding to an unfathomably bleak period in Grande’s timeline, beginning in 2017, when a suicide bomber attacked the Manchester stop of her Dangerous Woman Tour, leaving 22 concertgoers dead and many more injured; the following year, her dear friend, collaborator and ex-boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, died of an accidental overdose at 26.
“We talked about how, no matter what, she’s had to go up on that stage and give joy to people and how difficult that can be,” he continues. “That was where it all started, the seeds of Glinda, and obviously we weren’t going to do Ariana Grande’s story, but this was a character that lived in the same garden.”
The part didn’t come quickly or easily, however. In fact, Grande had to audition three separate times for producer Marc Platt and Chu, who had real hesitation about casting a global pop star who’d never carried a movie before. Never mind that the role required a precise cocktail of humor and vulnerability. After Grande’s first audition, she was asked to remove her pop star trappings before coming in again — so, at audition No. 2, there was no foundation, no winged eyeliner, no high ponytail.
“People who didn’t understand would say, ‘Oh, that’s so silly, they know how talented you are,’ and I was like, ‘That’s very nice, but Glinda requires so much. I have to be able to earn this and I don’t want it unless I’ve earned it,’ ” says Grande, oozing an earnestness that has defined the entire promotional tour. “It became this beautiful evolution of getting to know myself be
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