Wicked star Ethan Slater avoids question about Ariana Grande amid break-up rumours
As Wicked: For Good screens around the globe, the star couple is being forced to skirt around questions about their relationship.
Are Ariana Grande and boyfriend Ethan Slater over for good?
The actor was asked how it felt “working with [his] girlfriend every day” during a Today show interview Friday — and dodged the question.
Slater, 33, redirected co-host Craig Melvin’s line of questioning by calling “the entire cast [of Wicked: For Good] … incredible” instead.
Although the Broadway star did acknowledge that Grande, 32, is a “brilliant” actress, he gushed over “remarkable” Cynthia Erivo as well.
MORE: Ariana Grande’s wild gesture to Wicked co-star
Watching Grande and Erivo, 38, respectively play Glinda and Elphaba “from such a high level up close” was “pretty special” for Slater, he gushed.
“We filmed it years ago,” the Tony nominee explained to viewers. “I didn’t forget how amazing their performances were, but [I loved] getting to watch it with an audience.”
Slater noted that he has “sat in on the screenings at all the premieres” because it’s “fun” to “feel the energy of the audience.”
He concluded, “I’m so proud of everyone I got to work with. We’re, like, a family.”
Slater’s cryptic answers come amid swirling break-up rumours as he and Grande keep their distance on red carpets.
Slater, notably, included a photo of the Grammy winner in an Instagram carousel earlier this month, but the pair did not show PDA in the snap.
They were first linked in July 2023, the same month Slater filed for divorce from wife Lilly Jay, with whom he shares a now-3-year-old son.
Jay subsequently blasted Grande, insisting to Page Six that the former Nickelodeon star was “not a girl’s girl.”
Grande, for her part, ended her marriage to real estate broker Dalton Gomez later that same year.
In a November 2024 Entertainment Tonight interview, the singer praised her new partner as “adorable” and “amazing.”
Slater, for his part, referred to their relationship as “a beautiful thing” in a chat with GQ the previous month.
As for Jay, she gave rare insight into her and Slater’s co-parenting dynamic in a December 2024 essay published in the Cut.
“While our partnership has changed, our parenthood has not,” she wrote at the time. “Both of us fiercely love our son 100 per cent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided.”
The therapist labelled days with the little one “sunny,” admitting, “Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker.”
This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission.
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