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Ariana Grande Pursued Wicked Role For More Than a Decade: "I Sort of Didn't Want to Believe..."
Considering the fact that Grande is a longtime friend of Kristen Chenoweth, it seems only natural she'd be the one inherit the role of Oz's bubble-traveling "good witch."
It seems that Ariana Grande was always destined to play Glinda, Oz's bubble-traveling "good witch," in the big screen adaptation of Wicked (exclusively hitting theaters everywhere November 22). When she was only 10-years-old, the future Grammy-winning artist enjoyed a fateful backstage encounter with the role's originator, Kristen Chenoweth, following a Broadway performance of the acclaimed musical.
A decade later at age 20, Grande began auditioning for the movie version at Universal Pictures. Now, at the age of 31, fans will finally get to see Grande in the role she worked a lifetime to land.
How badly did Ariana Grande want the role of Glinda in the Wicked movie?
“She auditioned many times,” Wicked director Jon M. Chu (In the Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) recalled during an interview with 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 just couldn’t take your eyes away.”
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While she desperately wanted the part, Grande wasn't above helping out the other Glinda hopefuls, many of whom she knew personally and some of whom weren't intimately familiar with the material. "I was trying my very best to be 100 percent transparent with everyone," she explained. "Like, ‘This is my tea. This is what I’m singing. I’m going in on the 13th. I love you. Text me after.'"
What is Wicked about?
Based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the Broadway musical and its forthcoming film adaptations take the form of a Wizard of Oz prequel centered around the "villain" who will one day torment Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.
Born as a green-skinned outcast, the Wicked Witch of the West — aka Elphaba (The Outsider's Cynthia Erivo taking over from Idina Menzel) — was once a talented student at the prestigious Shiz University, where she was roommates with Glinda. Things start to go downhill once Elphaba travels to the Emerald City and meets the so-called Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), who may not be as "wonderful" as we once thought.
"The history of Oz is very sketchy, and I wanted to deepen it and to enrich it, and I wanted to be able to have some sense of how the entire society had worked and was working and might work in the future, depending on how people behaved. To that end, I made a list of the things that any cultural anthropologist going out in the field might actually consider upon finding a new population," Maguire said in 2013. "What are the inheritance structures? What are the class divides? How do the people in any particular part of the clan relate to clans outside and to differences within the clan? What is the attitude toward gender? And then what are some of the processes? The marriage processes? The birth processes? What is the relationship of fable and faith in that particular society?"
When does Wicked open in theaters?
Penned by Winnie Holzman (writer of the book for the original musical), Wicked arrives on the big screen Friday, November 22. The sequel, meanwhile, is scheduled to debut in theaters just a hair shy of a year later on November 21, 2025.
