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Ariana Grande is credited in both Wicked movies with her full name: Ariana Grande-Butera. She spoke out about the decision in 2024, saying it was to honor her father Edward Butera. Boutella recently attended the Paris premiere of Wicked: For Good, and Grande recorded her reaction when she saw the credits for the first time in 2024.
Ariana Grande returns as Glinda in Wicked: For Good, where she is credited with her full name, Ariana Grande-Butera, as in the previous film. The actress previously revealed that the credit reflects her personal connection to the role and to her father Edward Boutella, who supported her at the sequel’s Paris premiere in Paris earlier this month.
At the world premiere of Wicked in Sydney in 2024, reporter Justin Hill asked Grande about her decision to use her full hyphenated name instead of her traditional stage name. The star had an emotional response to the question.
“This experience feels very much like coming home for me,” Grande explained. “I feel like I came back to myself in a lot of ways with 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 nice way to honor that. It really felt like I’d come full circle, and it felt like exactly what I wanted to do.”
Grande later reiterated this point in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. She was asked how Butera felt watching the memorial service. Grande had previously been estranged from him.
“He cried[when he saw the credits],” she began. “He cried, and, you know, that was my name when I first saw ‘Wicked.’ I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I feel like this role and this project helped bring little Ali back home. Maybe she lost a part of her along the way in this crazy industry. And this experience helped me… I wanted to document that because I’m so grateful for that and it just happened. I literally texted you, remember, (Cynthia) Erivo) and I said, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t told anyone.’
Grande added, “I didn’t think it was too small for me either. And my dad cried. I surprised him. John[M. Chu, director of Wicked]was very generous. He sent me before he should have sent me — sorry, Universal, the cat is out of the bag.” He sent me the credit because he knew people were going to start seeing it soon and I was scared that someone would talk about it before he (my father) saw it and I surprised him. So I pulled it up. “He’s a graphic designer, so he wanted to show me the typography for the credits. Anyway, it was a big surprise, and he was so moved that he cried.”
Grande is a big fan of Wicked, the Broadway musical based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name. In a February 2024 interview with Variety magazine, she auditioned for the role of Glinda and talked about how she went about “deconstructing” her usual singer in order to “prove to them that I can take on a different personality.”
“I trained every day to prove to[Wicked’s]producers that I could take on this guy,” Grande said. “We had to completely erase the pop stars that they know so well, because they’re so branded as one thing that it becomes hard to believe in someone as different. We had to really work hard to get rid of that.”
Jon M. Chu’s film adaptations have a two-part release schedule. The first theatrical release will be on November 27, 2024, and the sequel will be released on November 21, 2025.
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