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While in Sydney, Australia, this week 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 a surprisingly 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 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.
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.