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Ariana Grande as Catwoman? DC Studios, pick up the phone right now. The pop star just shared her take on the superhero in her latest music video, “the boy is mine,” which dropped this morning.
In the visuals, directed by Christian Breslaur (who also helmed her “yes, and?” video), Grande plays a Selina Kyle-inspired character—leather outfit, whip, and all—who’s obsessed with the city mayor, Max Starling, played by Penn Badgley. She goes after him with a bottle of love potion one rainy night, but when she creeps into his apartment, it turns out she doesn’t need it after all. The black-and-white credits scene show them cozied up together, surrounded by several cats.
Brandy and Monica, whose original 1998 collab “The Boy Is Mine” is interpolated in Grande’s version, also appear the video as newscasters.
And if we want to talk more cameos, according to the credits, Grande’s good friend and former Victorious co-star Elizabeth Gillies voices…the rats. (I’m serious!)
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Grande, who first announced the music video on social media last week, built up more hype while appearing on The Tonight Show yesterday. “The video stars Penn Badgley, who I’ve been a fan of my entire life,” she told Jimmy Fallon. “It was so amazing to work with him. I’m such a fan. It was so fun.” Days prior to the confirmation, she’d hinted at Badgley’s starring role when she posted a video of him dancing to the song on Instagram.
Grande, whose relationship with boyfriend Ethan Slater has caused some conversation, acknowledged to Zane Lowe in March that releasing a song called “the boy is mine” could be “a very bad idea.” But at the same time, she said that a lot of her fans “really, they do love a bad girl anthem. And this is, I think, kind of an elevated version of that.”
She also told Zach Sang in an interview conducted before the release of her album eternal sunshine, “I’m so nervous because pieces of it touch on things that are real and then pieces of it are also just like, yeah, part of the concept. So what is that separation, and it’s so scary to leave it up to these selective-memory people to decipher. It’s scary, but I digress. Too late, the vinyls have been printed.”