In Wicked: For Good, pop star Ariana Grande solidifies herself as a dramatic actress

“Would you like a lozenge?” Ariana Grande asked, trilling her question as though it were the opening salvo to a song.

- Kyle Buchanan

Ariana Grande in Wicked: For Good (film art). PHOTO: UNIVERSAL PICTURES

(UNIVERSAL PICTURES)

It was a rainy October afternoon in New York and I had met the American actress-singer in The New York Times offices just after a photo shoot, but before the overbooked star joined her family to celebrate her late grandmother’s birthday.

“My nonna would have been 100, so we're going to FaceTime her best friends,” she explained. “We're all having dinner together, so I'm basically going to be a basket case all night.”

Big things can come in small packages, as Grande has now amply proved. Like her musical-comedy forebear Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda on Broadway before Grande brought her to the screen in 2024’s Wicked, the 157m star is a petite powerhouse.

And the sequel Wicked: For Good, opening in Singapore cinemas on Nov 20, will showcase Grande’s dramatic chops in a whole new way.

At 32, Grande has already lived through several eras in the public eye — first as a teenager starring in Nickelodeon sitcoms, then as a pop princess with a string of chart-topping hits, and finally as a big-screen ingenue whose first major film role earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.

Still, people have never seen her go to the places she does in the second Wicked film, which brings Grande’s character to the fore in a much more significant way than audiences might have anticipated.

“Being able to share it with people and talk about it is strange because it’s been a secret for such a long time,” she said.

When For Good begins, the budding friendship between Glinda and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has been severed, as the conniving Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and his second-in-command Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) have unfairly branded the green-skinned Elphaba a wicked witch hellbent on the destruction of Oz.