It seems Ariana Grande wanted to pay homage to Ariana pequeña.
During a recent interview, the “Thank U, Next” singer explained to Australian radio station Hit 104.7 Canberra why she decided to use her full legal name — Ariana Grande-Butera — in the credits for her upcoming film, “Wicked,” in which she’ll play “good witch” Glinda.
“Technically, it’s my little girl name!” she explained. “It’s little Ari’s name.”
“I just feel like this experience was such a homecoming for me,” she continued. “I feel like I came home to myself in a lot of ways through what I learned from Glinda, from Elphaba.”
Matthew Stockman via Getty Images
She then added a very cute detail.
“That was my name when I went to see [“Wicked” the play] when I was 10 years old. It felt like a really lovely way of honoring that. It felt really full circle. It just felt like something I wanted to do.”
The sentiment is very sweet, although Grande’s romantic relationship with her “Wicked” co-star Ethan Slater has left some fans bitter.
Last summer, Grande divorced her husband after two years of marriage and Slater separated from his high school sweetheart, with whom he’d been married for five years.
Sources close to Slater and Grande told People that the two didn’t begin dating until they were both officially single, but Slater’s ex, Lilly Jay, suggested otherwise to Page Six last July.
In an interview with Vanity Fair this month, Grande “dispute[d] specific allegations” about her relationship with Slater, but kept things relatively vague — saying only that “there couldn’t be a less accurate depiction” of Slater than the cheating rumors coming from the tabloids.
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Slater, a Tony Award-nominated Broadway actor, told GQ in an interview published last week that the online hate spurred by his relationship with Grande has been “really difficult.”
“There were a lot of big changes in private lives that were really happening,” Slater told the magazine. “So it’s really hard to see people who don’t know anything about what’s happening commenting on it and speculating, and then getting things wrong about the people you love.”