Is Wicked the best movie based on a musical based on a book based on another movie based on another book? Yes. But even if you remove those hyper-specific qualifiers, Wicked is getting [extremely Julianne Moore in 30 Rock voice] wicked good reviews. The Jon M. Chu-directed film has a strong 90 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with universally positive reviews for Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda.
Erivo has been a movie star since making her big-screen debut in Steve McQueen’s Widows, one of the most under-appreciated films of the 2010s. But Wicked is, somewhat surprisingly, Grande’s first starring role in a movie. And her first sizable role in any project since her Nickelodeon days.
Let’s take a look back at the firsts that led Grande to Wicked, beginning in Florida where Ariana had an awfully long way to go.
First Starring Role
For a lot of New Yorkers, the dream is to retire and move to Florida. Ariana Grande’s journey began in reverse: she was born in Florida, and from a young age, dreamed of performing under the bright lights of Broadway. She would get there eventually, but not before making one of her first live performances at a hockey game in the Sunshine State.
An eight-year-old Grande sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a Florida Panthers game in 2002, four years after her mom paid $200 in a charity auction to have her curly-haired daughter ride a zamboni at then-National Car Rental Center. (She also got hit in the wrist with a hockey puck… twice.)
Around the same time, she was getting into theater. Grande made her acting debut in a production of Annie with the Fort Lauderdale Children’s Theater (there is footage, and yes, it’s cute). This wasn’t a case of Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school basketball team with Grande playing one of the lesser-known orphans; she was cast as Annie. A star right from the start.
First Musical
If Grande had her way, her first album would have come out much earlier than 2013. “I was 14 years old [in 2007/2008] and ready to make an R&B album,” Grande told Marie Claire. “I was like, ‘Where is that Mary J. Blige collab? Where is that Natasha Bedingfield writing session? Where is my session with India.Arie? I’m ready. Let’s go.’ I wrote this song called ‘Higher,’ and the lyrics were too sexual, too mature.” Her mom told her, “This is a great song, but damn, you’re too young for this.” So, naturally, Grande did what any rebellious teenager would do in this situation: she got cast in a Broadway musical.
13 is about a teenage boy on the verge of his Bar Mitzvah who is dealing with a move from New York City to rural Indiana and the divorce of his parents. Grande played gossipy Charlotte during the Broadway run of the musical, which was later turned into a Netflix movie. But 13’s most notable contribution to culture — besides “A Little More Homework” — is that it was the professional debut of not only Grande, but also Elizabeth Gillies. They would go on to star in Victorious, the first of Grande’s many Nickelodeon shows.
Without the proving ground of 13, she might not have been cast in Victorious. Without Victorious (and its spinoff, Sam & Cat), her YouTube channel might not have caught the attention of Republic Records CEO Monte Lipman. A friend sent him videos of Grande covering Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and he liked what he heard so much that he signed her to a record contract.
Grande has gone on to record 22 top-five singles.
First Starring Role In A Movie Musical
When Ariana Grande was a kid, she won an auction (a different auction than the zamboni one) to go backstage and meet Wicked star Kristin Chenoweth at New York City’s Gershwin Theatre. “Her mom and grandma brought her back,” the Glinda actress recalled, “and she sang a little bit of ‘Popular.’ And I thought, well, you’re pretty good.”
Little did Chenoweth know that Grande would eventually be cast as Glinda. But in the years between this encounter and the movie, Grande kept a strong connection to Wicked. She sang “What Is This Feeling?” with Seth MacFarlane on Carpool Karaoke: The Series (what a sentence); she belted “The Wizard And I,” with green lipstick, on NBC’s A Very Wicked Halloween special; and she fan-casted herself as Glinda over a decade ago. Even the song that landed her on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time has a Wicked connection.
But even with her history with the material (and — perhaps as significantly — her 376 million Instagram followers), Grande didn’t tap her heels together three times and instantly get the part. “She auditioned many times,” Chu told Vanity Fair. “I sort of didn’t want to believe that she could do this. It seems almost too easy to say, ‘Oh, Ariana Grande.’ [But] every time she came in, she was the most interesting person. You couldn’t take your eyes away.”
The obvious-in-retrospect casting paid off: she’s considered a frontrunner to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2025 Oscars. For Ariana Grande, there’s no place like Wicked.