Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo have become a (platonic) power couple on their press tour for Wicked, leading some fans to speculate that the two are more than just friends. Now, in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Grande revealed that though she expected the shipping, fans’ fervor for her and Erivo caught her off-guard.
“People think we’re secretly married,” Grande said, adding her reaction to fanfiction and art of their Wicked characters Glinda and Elphaba, which she referred to as “the Gelphie stuff.”
“I wish I could unsee some things,” she said. “I mean, wow, I had a feeling, but I didn’t know it would be on this scale or this graphic.”
Some fans wondered exactly where Grande was encountering that so-called “Gelphie stuff.” Was she searching for her own name on fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own, or did it make its way to her via social media?
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Others reminded the internet that shipping Elphaba and Glinda, fictional characters, is one thing — but shipping real life people like Grande and Erivo is entirely another.
After all, Grande herself has famously supported a queer reading of Wicked, saying that she thinks Glinda “might be a little in the closet” and that Glinda and Elphaba are “in love with each other.”
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An unexpected coupling…
In the new interview, Grande also discussed what her future career might look like, saying her focus for the moment is on acting, not music.
“At a certain point, you get tired of that [pop star] character, because it is a character,” she said. “There are pieces of you and your story that are woven throughout your songwriting, but then, because of the way it travels and becomes sensationalized, it gets away from you. And beneath all of it is just a girl from Boca who loves art, and I think that’s why it’s been such a deeply healing gift to disappear into this character — to take off one mask and put on another.”
Playing Glinda also helped Grande rediscover herself outside of her pop persona, she said: “It became this beautiful evolution of getting to know myself beneath it all. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I love this person underneath the drag.’”
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