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What’s next for Ariana Grande after the gravity-defying success of Wicked?
“There is something else I’m very excited about down the line,” the actress-musician, 32, teased in a new interview with Variety. “I can’t say much yet, but it’s something that inspires me deeply.”
That upcoming project, she added mysteriously, “contains multitudes.”
Grande and Cynthia Erivo led director Jon M. Chu’s two-part movie musical adaptation of Broadway’s Wicked. For reprising her role as Glinda, the Good Witch of Oz, in Wicked: For Good, Grande has earned her second Golden Globe, Critics Choice and Actor Award nominations in a row.
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“It’s incredibly surreal,” Grande told Variety when asked about forever being known, after last year’s Wicked: Part One, as an Academy Award-nominated performer. “It still doesn’t feel real. It feels like the warmest welcome into a community I truly love. I love acting. I love actors. I love talking about acting and learning about other people’s processes — and my own. It’s life-changing, and I’ll never take it for granted.”
Again teasing what screen projects might be ahead, the “Yes, And?” singer said she wanted to “take on roles that exercise different muscles and ask something new of me… I’m drawn to things that feel different.”
Grande’s two announced projects in the works, a season of American Horror Story and costarring with Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro in Focker In-Law (in theaters Nov. 25), fit the brief for something different after playing Glinda. “More very soon,” she promised.
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Also ahead for the Grammy winner is a tour in promotion of her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine, beginning in June 2026. However, she also told Amy Poehler during an appearance on the podcast Good Hang in November that touring “might not happen again for a long, long, long, long time.”
After the critical and commercial success of Wicked and its sequel, there’s also the possibility of more Elphaba and Glinda, as Grande teased during a November Q&A. “First of all, no one’s going anywhere,” she said in a video uploaded to her Instagram. “We’re not saying goodbye to anything. These characters will be a part of our hearts always. They’ve changed our lives irrevocably and permanently, and I’m so grateful for that.”
