While in Sydney, Australia, for the world premiere of Wicked, Ariana Grande was asked about how she has been listed in the film’s credits. As they roll, her full name comes up on the screen: Ariana Grande-Butera.
Australian reporter Justin Hill asked about the choice to use her full and hyphenated name instead of her traditional stage name. The star had an emotional response to the question.
“I just feel like this experience was such a homecoming for me,” Grande explained. “I feel like I came home to myself in a lot of ways through what I learned from Glinda [and] from Elphaba. [Ariana Grande-Butera] was my name when I went to see the show when I was 10-years-old, and it felt like a really lovely way of honoring that. It felt really full circle, and it just felt like something I wanted to do.”
Grande reiterated this point later in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. She was asked about how her father, Edward Butera, felt watching the tribute. Grande had been estranged from him previously.
“He cried [when he saw the credits],” she began. “He cried and you know, that was my name when I first saw Wicked and I do feel, not to sound like a broken record, but I do feel like this role and this project helped me come home to little Ari and maybe little pieces of her got lost along the way in this crazy industry. And I’m so grateful for the ways in which this experience led me back so I kind of just wanted to capture that. It happened so randomly. I literally was just like—remember, I texted you [Cynthia Erivo], and I said I haven’t told anyone but I’m doing this. And she said, ‘holy shit, yeah!’”
Grande added, “It doesn’t feel small to me either. And my dad cried. I surprised him. Jon [M. Chu, Wicked’s director] was so generous. He sent me before he was supposed to send me—sorry, Universal, the cat is out of the bag. He sent me the credits because he knew people were going to start seeing it soon, and he was scared someone was going to talk about it before he [my dad] got to see it and me surprise him. So I pulled it up in my laptop, and I recorded him secretly, and I told him I wanted to show him the typography of the credits because he is a graphic designer. He loves that stuff. And anyway, it was a big surprise, and he cried. It was very emotional.”
Grande is a massive fan of the Broadway musical iteration of Wicked, which is based on the book of the same name by Gregory Maguire. In a February interview with Variety, she talked about how she worked to “deconstruct” her regular singing person so she could audition as Glinda and “prove to them that I could handle taking on another persona.”
“I trained every single day to prove to [Wicked producers] that I could handle taking on this other person,” Grande said. “I had to completely erase popstar Ari—the person they know so well — because it’s harder to believe someone as someone else because they’re so branded as one thing. I had to really go all the way to strip that down.”
Jon M. Chu’s movie adaptation is being released in two parts, with the first hitting theaters on Nov. 27. Part two will be released in 2025.
