Most people assume Ariana Grande walked into the Wicked casting process as a lock. The reality was almost the opposite.
In a candid conversation with Adam Sandler for Variety’s Actors on Actors series last year, Grande opened up about just how hard she had to fight before anyone would even let her through the door. The production team didn’t want famous faces. Grande begged anyway. And then she showed up to that audition and sang four songs across two roles just to prove she belonged there.
The Audition Nobody Wanted To Give Her
Grande told Sandler that she had to press hard just to get a shot. “I begged for an audition. I didn’t know if they would’ve even considered seeing me for it,” she said. “They didn’t want anyone that they knew to play these roles.”
The hesitancy from the production side wasn’t personal. It was a deliberate creative decision. Filmmakers wanted a clean slate, characters audiences could meet fresh without the weight of pre-existing associations. For a star of Grande’s profile, that was a real obstacle.
But she wasn’t going to sit it out. Grande had been auditioning for the movie version at Universal Pictures since she was 20 years old, and by the time she finally got her shot, she was fully prepared to leave nothing on the table.
Her first audition required her to sing four songs: “No One Mourns the Wicked,” “Popular,” “Wizard and I,” and “Defying Gravity.” She had to do each of them twice. That’s not a standard audition. That’s a test. And she passed it.
What made it even more surreal was the miscommunication baked into the process. Grande’s first Wicked audition was on August 13, 2021, and she was asked to prepare for both Elphaba and Glinda. Because she had publicly sung Elphaba’s “The Wizard and I” on NBC’s celebration of the musical’s 15th anniversary during a 2018 Halloween special, casting made the incorrect assumption that Grande was interested in the part of Elphaba. Grande knew she was always there for Glinda, but she went along with it rather than create an awkward moment.
Director Jon M. Chu recalled the confusion: “She was being nice to me, and I was being nice to her. We just let her do it. But in my mind I was like, ‘Why is she singing Elphaba right now?'”
From Begging for an Audition to Awards History
The gamble paid off in a way few could have predicted. Chu later reflected on what he saw in Grande across those auditions: “She auditioned many times. 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,” he said.
What followed was a full-circle moment years in the making. When she was only 10 years old, Grande had a backstage encounter with Kristin Chenoweth, the originator of the Glinda role on Broadway, following a Broadway performance of the musical. Two decades later, she was playing that same role in one of the most anticipated film adaptations in recent memory.
The response to her performance exceeded expectations. She earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the first film, making her one of the few pop stars to cross over into serious awards contention.
Grande and co-star Cynthia Erivo made further history with their nominations for the 2026 Golden Globes, becoming the first two actors in the same film to be nominated twice for their respective roles. At the Grammys, Grande and Erivo won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Defying Gravity,” adding another milestone to what became one of the more decorated runs in recent awards history for a film performance.
For a role she once had to beg just to audition for, the vindication could not have been more complete.
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