rundown
Ariana Grande has been nominated for Best Supporting Female Actor in a Motion Picture at tonight’s Golden Globe Awards. The Wicked: For Good star stepped out with a friend rather than her boyfriend Ethan Slater. She posed alone on the red carpet, then longtime friend Doug Middlebrook joined her on her entrance.
Slater’s absence from the ceremony is not necessarily unusual for the couple. Slater also didn’t attend last week’s Critics Choice Awards with Grande, with the pair trying to keep the focus on work rather than romance.
Doug Middlebrook and Ariana Grande attend the Golden Globe Awards.
Grande and Slater avoided posing as a couple on their recent Wicked: For Good tour. In November, multiple sources told TMZ that the two were still dating despite rumors of their split, but sources reported that they were “adamant that it’s just their private lives and that they want to focus on their movies and not their personal lives.”
The actress hinted that she and Slater are doing well over the holidays by reposting two videos of herself that her partner shared on his Instagram Stories.
Otherwise, Grande continues to make public comments focused on awards season campaigns and new films. She last detailed her relationship with Slater in September 2024, when she addressed tabloid reports about her personal life in an interview with Vanity Fair.
“It never gets any easier when you see the negativity generated by disreputable tabloids,” she said. “Of course, during the filming of this movie, I went through a lot of life changes, and so did a lot of the people who were working on this movie. We were apart for two years. So, of course, I understand why it was a field day for the tabloids to kind of make something to pay the bills.”
She added: “When I see people misunderstand me and my loved ones, it’s an insatiable frustration, an inexplicable feeling of hell.”
Grande praised Slater, but otherwise kept her comments about him limited, saying, “There’s no one on this planet who would go the extra mile or put themselves out there for the people he loves and cares about. There’s no one on this planet with a better heart, and no amount of bullshit tabloids can translate that into reality.”
