Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Emma Chance | Celebrity | December 11, 2024
Ariana Grande’s been catching a lot of flack lately for being seemingly stuck as Glinda in her voice and overall manner. During press tour interviews she seems equal parts bubbly and weepy, as if she’s still wearing the crown and carrying the wand. Frankly, I find it entertaining (though I wish for her sake we could be done with the blonde), but I think she was back to her normal self, or a slightly better, “Glindafied” version, in her recent “Actors on Actors” conversation with Paul Mescal for Variety.
It was an obvious pair, with Mescal starring in Gladiator II, which came out on the same weekend as Wicked, but also because they’re both huge theater nerds, musical or otherwise.
“I’ve seen you sing on YouTube,” Grande told Mescal, helpfully reminding us that he got his start in theater.
“I definitely share the musical theater bug,” Mescal agreed, though he admitted that he wasn’t the best dancer or singer, so he went in a different direction. But even someone with a voice like Grande’s had to train for the demands of a character like Glinda.
“It’s operatic and very classical,” she explained, “Which is different from … falsetto and whistle tones—it’s just a totally different placement in the voice, so, I wanted to train to sound authentic.”
It’s interesting, knowing her to be a fan of musical theater and knowing how hard she, by her own admission, lobbied for the part, to hear that there was so much training required. It speaks to a point Mescal makes later in the conversation when he’s reflecting on how he got cast in Gladiator in the first place.
“The clue that I took was from Ridley [Scott] when he told me, he cast me because of Normal People,” he explained. “Ridley Scott always watches a bedtime story before he goes to sleep and at the time when he was casting Gladiator II he was watching Normal People in bed.” This story, he said, gave him the confidence he needed for the part because “There’s nothing that I’ve done before that indicates, ‘This is your guy for an action, dramatic epic.’ The work that I’ve done before is more internalized.”
“You know when you see artists or painters that you really admire? You look at, like, Van Gogh’s got a particular style or Vermeer or somebody like that…no one’s asking Vermeer to paint like Van Gogh…I think actors should be afforded something similar.”
He explained that he took his casting as permission to bring that internalized quality he’s known for to a movie like Gladiator, and I think Grande did the same thing with Wicked. She trained for authenticity, but she brought a decidedly modern pop sensibility to the role and, by extension, the film.
