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The afternoon sun beams into a white-walled rehearsal room inside a multi-use office building in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, where the actor Ethan Slater is stretched deep into a lunge.
His front knee is bent at a 90-degree angle. His mouth is curled into a silent, upturned smile. Making careful adjustments, Slater fine-tunes his body language—chin jutted, eyebrows still, arms dialed in, spine rolled down, fingers held together to form a taut “blade.”
The director and playwright Marshall Pailet sits opposite him on a folding chair. Paliet is Slater’s creative partner and close friend of over a decade; both he and Slater are now the fathers of young children, but during the pandemic, before either of them had kids, they would spend at least eight hours a day together on Zoom, six days a week, working through ideas. For the past few years, they’ve been workshopping a play they wrote together, Marcel on the Train, based on the true story of the renowned French mime Marcel Marceau helping transport dozens of Jewish orphans from Nazi-occupied France to neutral territory during World War II. Slater plays Marceau, who keeps the children entertained on the harrowing journey by performing pantomime.
This is an interim project before the November 22 premiere of another, very different Slater effort: Wicked, director Jon M. Chu’s cinematic adaptation of the beloved musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz. In the film, Slater plays a wide-eyed Munchkin named Boq, whose one-sided crush on the bubbly Galinda Upland (played by Ariana Grande) winds up having some relatively consequential effects on the future of Oz itself. And because Chu split the story into two movies, concluding this film where the Broadway play’s first act ends, Slater will spend much of the next 12 months in promo mode for Wicked and then Wicked Part Two, which rolls out next November and features even more Boq than part one.
I watch Slater’s reflection in the studio mirror as he continues to tweak his movements, positioning each joint and muscle—knuckles, knees, lips—just so. He is athletic and nimble, dressed comfortably in a gray Carhartt hoodie, brown Dickies work pants, and scuffed Vans Old Skools. (Later, when we head out for lunch, he’ll throw on a black corduroy hat embroidered with the phrase “Read Banned Books.”) He has a shock of red curls and matching auburn stubble, the latter of which subtly ages his otherwise youthful face: freckles, heavy-lidded brown eyes, a slight gap between his two front teeth. He pushes his sweatshirt sleeves up to his elbows, nudging his feet on the gray vinyl floor.
“You see that lunge?” Pailet says admiringly. “You know, Ethan sells himself short. He’s so physical. No, seriously! For someone, like, who didn’t grow up with dance training.”
Slater, 32, was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, not far from Washington, DC, and while he didn’t grow up dancing, he was both a childhood thespian and a high-school wrestler—a confluence that perhaps predestined his longtime personal and professional fascination with physical-comedy greats like Marceau, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton.
“It is a funny twist on my life,” he says, “that that’s become one of the main things I do.” His skillful physicality and spiritual buoyancy lent themselves perfectly to the role that put him on the map: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, one of the more surreal projects ever to grace the Great White Way, in which Slater managed to embody the chipper Nickelodeon invertebrate wearing just a red tie, yellow short-sleeve collared shirt, striped tube socks, and suspendered plaid pants. No yellow body paint, no quadrilateral foam costume—he became Bikini Bottom’s most famous fry cook through pure corporeal alchemy. In 2018 the performance earned him a Tony nomination.
The three of us huddle around Pailet’s MacBook to watch a YouTube video of Marceau in the 1970s as his silent tragicomic character Bip the Clown, performing a routine called “The Maskmaker,” a work he originated in 1959. Perched on a chair a few feet from the screen, Slater sips the watery dregs of an iced coffee and molds his face and hands to mirror Marceau’s movements: one moment, putting on an eyes-wide, putty-like grin he nicknames “the Jim Carrey”; the next, exaggeratedly weeping with hands in front of his face, heaving his shoulders like a distraught Sim.
“He’s such a weird body poet,” Slater says of Marceau. “That’s the thing that’s so funny about him, and that’s also the thing [about mime] that feels so silly and vulnerable and, like, embarrassing sometimes, to do. It’s like reading your poetry.”
After the hour-long mime sesh, Slater and I exit the building into an idyllic New York City early fall afternoon: warm enough that we’re not quite yet in Nora Ephron territory, but brisk enough that the air itself feels like a new thrill. The kind of clear-blue-sky day that makes you say, as Slater does while we wander up Ninth Avenue in search of a place that’s still serving lunch, “I do love it here.”
Work takes him away a lot—he just wrapped a movie in New Orleans, and is currently filming another project in Canada—but Slater has lived in and around the city for most of the past decade. He was a sophomore at Vassar College, studying drama, political science, and music, when he nailed the first day of casting for SpongeBob; he got the call offering him the part while he was on the train back from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie, a two-hour Metro-North ride away. The show was still in development then, and they molded the titular role around him. SpongeBob opened first in Chicago in 2016 and moved to Manhattan’s Palace Theatre the next year, where Slater made his Broadway debut. All told, he spent seven years of his life in Bikini Bottom; he was 19 when he was cast, and 26 in 2018 when the play closed.
We find a table in a spacious and mostly empty Mexican restaurant whose open façade lets in light and air from the aforementioned perfect fall day. (As it happens, we’re just a few minutes from the Gershwin Theatre, which has been home to Wicked on Broadway since it opened in 2003.) It’s quiet enough inside that the restaurant’s soundtrack—which consists solely of bossa nova covers of Top 40 hits from the past several decades of pop music, from Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” to the Cardigans’ “Lovefool”—makes us both laugh at its uncanniness. We start with chips and guac; Slater, who is vegan, orders the calabacitas tacos without cheese.
Our conversation flows easily; Slater is smart and thoughtful, with the rare quality of being a very attentive listener. His time making Wicked has yielded exciting new professional prospects as well as a dramatically overhauled personal life. If he’s nervous to discuss those latter shifts—namely, his romantic relationship with Grande, which he hasn’t said much about since it became public in the spring of 2023—it bodes that we’ll move through that unease with intention. To hear him tell it, he’s just begun to find his footing in the madness around the impending release of the enormous, long-awaited project that has shaped this chapter of his life.
“I think I’ve finally, after quite a bit of time, resigned to it, or I’ve embraced it,” he says. “It’s going to be hectic for a while, and then I look forward to moments where I can breathe a little, and then it’ll be hectic again. It’s a good thing. Counting my blessings.”
Ethan Slater made his musical-theater debut at age four, playing Toto the dog to his older sister’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. His primary task, as he remembers it, was to pull back the curtain to reveal the Wizard in the final act. “I tripped and fell,” he recalls now, scooping guacamole from a stone mortar with a tortilla chip, “and the whole thing fell down, and I was hooked.”
Slater continued doing plays throughout his childhood in the DC suburbs. When he and his two older sisters were younger, his family would drive to various American national parks; he feels a particular nostalgia for Yellowstone because it reminds him of his late mother, Karen, who died when he was seven. On those long trips, his father, Jay, a physician at the Food and Drug Administration, played Paul Simon on the car stereo. By late elementary school, Slater had picked up the guitar, which led to a deeper love of songwriting that he admits probably “kept me from getting better at guitar, because I always wanted to be writing a Bob Dylan–style song.”
When he was 11, he went on a class trip to New York to see Wicked with its original, not-yet-Tony-winning Broadway cast of heavy hitters like Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth, Norbert Leo Butz, and Joel Grey. It was the first of five times he’s seen the show live since. Wicked—one of three Broadway productions to surpass $1 billion in box-office revenue, along with The Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King—has run continuously for 21 years; as it happens, when Slater moved to New York to be an actor, one of his first Broadway auditions was for the role of Boq. He didn’t get the part but found a silver lining nonetheless.
He recently found an email his friend sent to him back then, asking how the audition went. “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think I got it. But I’m hopeful that I made some fans in the room.’ I was a really sweet, naive 22-year-old,” he says with a laugh, though he quickly recalculates that assessment. “Not naive, I was being optimistic. It was a really good experience.”
The year 2021 brought another fork in the proverbial yellow brick road: Slater opened up Twitter while he was sitting in a coffee shop with his sister and saw that Broadway powerhouse Cynthia Erivo and pop superstar Ariana Grande had been respectively cast as star-crossed witches Elphaba and Glinda in an upcoming Wicked film. He’d seen Erivo onstage as Celie in The Color Purple, he adds, “and of course Ari’s Ari, and she’s amazing. She’s a comedian who’s also got this crazy voice that can do anything.” (Days after our meeting, Grande hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time, and the episode fetched the show’s highest ratings since 2021. Per Slater, “My unbiased opinion is that she’s one of the best comedians that’s been in a movie in a long time. She’s a genius.”)
Still, he says, even auditioning for the Wicked movie seemed “so out of the realm of possibility. I mean, everybody who was around five-foot-seven in New York City knew about Boq being a role that you could audition for.” But Slater went for it anyway, sending in a self-taped audition in which he ran lines against himself by also reading Glinda and Elphaba’s younger sister Nessarose’s parts in character. He’s pretty sure the tape looked “ridiculous,” but it got him a callback. Eventually, after many months and a final five-hour audition in LA, Chu gave him the part, and Slater was off to Oz—or, technically, England, where the film was shot.
Chu remembers that first self-tape differently. “He was just so natural and so likable, and you root for him,” the director tells me. “I think you root for Ethan Slater as a human being.” Chu knew early on that Slater was right for Boq; he even modeled the movie’s version of Munchkinland in Slater’s likeness.
“We wanted [Boq] to come from a culture, and so we were trying to reinvent what a Munchkin is. In our eyes, Munchkin was not a size,” Chu explains. “We built the Munchkinland look around him, in a weird way—like this red-haired, fair-skinned type of character.” The director envisioned an agricultural society full of “joyful, innocent people” who “harvested the joy [and] the colors of all of Oz”—the kind of setting where Slater’s natural physical strength and playfulness would thrive.
For Slater—who prepared for the role by reading with Broadway’s original Boq, Christopher Fitzgerald, whom Slater later acted alongside in Spamalot—finding his character’s heart was personal. Boq arrives at Oz’s prestigious Shiz University as a klutzy transplant from Munchkinland then falls for the (canonical!) popular girl; Slater saw him as “this lovely guy who really wants to find his community and wants to find his place, and it feels like he’s found it at Shiz. It’s something that I feel like a lot of us can relate to, something that I felt like I could really relate to.” The character’s arc through the two films, he says, touches on “the disillusionment of somebody who goes in optimistic, and the relatability of that—and also, the culpability in that.”
To build Oz, Chu opted for the sort of fantastically life-size physical sets that even major studio movies hardly bother with anymore. Walking on set, Slater says, “felt like we were walking onto the set of Ben-Hur.” In an early scene, a group of incoming students arrive at Shiz by boat. That cerulean-toned body of water they’re floating in on? “They built a fucking lake,” says Slater.
In Wicked Part One, a preoccupied Glinda—uninterested in Boq’s affections—craftily sets him up with Nessarose, played by Marissa Bode in her first professional role. One day on set, Grande invited Bode and Slater into her tent to read their tarot cards; as Bode recalls it, both her and Slater’s outlooks were good.
When I spoke with Bode over Zoom, she told me she’d called Slater on the phone the night before, because she was feeling overwhelmed as the movie’s release loomed. They discussed “navigating that throughout this whole journey. He also gets anxious as well,” she said. “We’ve talked before about just being perceived, which is this scary thing to me anyways, with so many people watching. It’s so cool having this opportunity and having so many people be able to see me, but it is also a little bit—there’s so many eyes, you know what I mean? And he’s basically like, ‘We have the rest of the cast to lean on. We’re all here for one another.’”
Slater also became close with his castmate Bowen Yang. The Saturday Night Live player portrays Glinda’s quippy crony Pfannee; on their days off from shooting, Yang and Slater rattled around London as tourists, falling into deep conversations in various cafés, restaurants, and pubs and bonding over their shared love of comedy as craft.
“It felt quite romantic, even though I can’t think of a more platonic straight-male to gay-male friendship in my life than Ethan and I,” Yang says, laughing. “There are people in the world who are able to put other people on this accelerated path towards familiarity and friendship and fellowship. Ethan, I think more than almost everybody I’ve met, has that quality about him.”
In practice, Slater’s anchoring presence “was kind of a life preserver” for the SNL star. “He brought me into this really nice matrix of friendship between everybody else in the cast, between Cynthia and Ari and Marissa,” Yang says. “[He] was, in a lot of ways, like this glue. He has this incredibly adhesive quality to him.”
The film’s cast and crew have described the UK-based set as an intimate bubble not unlike the rose-tinted one Glinda floats in around Oz, in which everyone cared deeply about doing right by the story. Thinking back to the intensity of the experience, Slater recalls something his castmate Jonathan Bailey (who plays the willfully smooth-brained aristocrat-heartthrob Fiyero) said on set one day. “He was like, ‘You’re working on [Wicked] and it feels like you’re doing this little student film. And then you see the paparazzi drone fly by and you’re like, ‘Oh, no it’s not. People really care,’” Slater recounts. “But that was kind of the feeling it had, in the way that student films can be intense, because everybody’s pouring themselves into it.”
And as production stretched out over two years, lives changed both inside and outside of the bubble. In August 2022, Slater and his then-wife, Lilly Jay, whom he’d met as a teenager and began dating in college, welcomed their first child, a son; in July 2023, per TMZ, Slater filed for divorce after five years of marriage. Days earlier, the outlet had reported that Slater and Grande—who had also recently split from her now-ex-husband Dalton Gomez—were a couple. The public commentary about the timeline, circumstances, and optics of their courtship, from fans and media alike, was swift and brutal.
It was not Grande’s first time being grist for the gossip mill. She’s had several high-profile relationships in the past, and weathered the storm in pop-star fashion: by making hit songs about her experiences. (Earlier this year, she sang the quiet part loud in the defiant first single from her seventh studio album, Eternal Sunshine, punctuating the barbed bridge of “Yes, And?” with a franker question: “Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?”) For Slater—a low-key actor mostly unknown outside of Broadway, who was still exiting the off-ramp of a decade-plus-long relationship—the blowback was deeply, unfamiliarly painful.
But today, as we chat over tacos and the thin din of algorithmic-Top-40 bossa nova, Slater is in a happier place.
“You also fell in love making this movie,” I say to him. “Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like?”
“Yeah,” he nods, taking a sip of his water. He laughs, blushing; I, too, laugh, blushing. “That’s a really sweet question,” he says, finally. “That’s really nice of you to ask. That’s a really sweet question.”
But he continues, composing himself quickly. “Obviously, it was a really super big year,” he says, “and I think there was something that was really difficult about things in your private life being commented on and looked at by the public. There were a lot of big changes in private lives that were really happening, so it’s really hard to see people who don’t know anything about what’s happening commenting on it and speculating, and then getting things wrong about the people you love. So just to address that part of it, that feels really hard.
“But, of course, it was an amazing year and a really beautiful thing, and I’m just really excited. I’m just really, really proud of Ari and the work she’s done on this. She’s poured herself into it. I’m really proud that I got to be there for that part of it, and I’m really excited to be there for this next step of it when the world gets to see the amazing thing that she did.”
The day before our interview, Slater shared a clip on his Instagram story of Grande performing Eternal Sunshine’s penultimate track, “Imperfect for You,” a sweet, strummy ballad about symbiotic love and acceptance that fans believe Grande penned about her and Slater’s relationship. (Fans have also theorized that the album’s initials, E.S., mirror her boyfriend’s name.) “How could we know we’d rearrange all the cosmos?” she sings tenderly in the pre-chorus. “We crashed and we burned / Now I just can’t go where you don’t go.”
At the Mexican restaurant, I ask about the song, curious about what it’s like to have one of our greatest living pop stars write lyrics about falling in love with you—but Slater pivots, perhaps bashfully, to praising Grande’s chops as a songwriter. “She’s such an amazing performer, and I think everyone knows how good she is [as] a recording artist and all that—but I’m just really blown away by the songwriting,” he tells me. “I love that song.”
For Grande, songwriting has clearly been a way to process the stresses and sorrows of life in the public eye. And while Slater’s been performing for years, this sort of jagged attention is new. I ask him if he’s found a similar outlet.
“I do a lot of writing,” he says. “It’s obviously a different kind of writing. I do songwriting—that’s mostly for me, that’s my hobby at this point. And Marshall and I write a lot together. I write a lot on my own, and I think that has been my outlet in a lot of ways.”
Plus, he says, “I’ve got an amazing support system of family and friends who I talk to and confide in”—something he’s thankful for “in an industry that can be a little tough, that I’m just starting to get a taste of both sides of.”
“But also, again,” he points out, “some of the hard parts that you’re talking about are the personal-life stuff that everybody in the world goes through. And so I am really focused on the real people in my life, who those things affect, and doing right by every real person and not the Twitter people who comment on it.”
You can hear him being careful, thinking of those real people, the ones who exist outside this moment, like Jay, and the two-year-old son they’re co-parenting—another part of his life he’s wary of addressing today. Being a dad, he says gently, “is the best thing in the world. It’s been an interesting thing to navigate as a new parent. There’s nothing I want to do more than just show you pictures and talk about him because he’s the best and the light of my life. But I also want to give him the opportunity to meet the world on his own terms…to meet the world in an analog way and not through my words.”
In her recent Vanity Fair cover story, Grande also spoke carefully about her partner. “No one on this earth tries harder or spreads themselves thinner to be there for the people that he loves and cares about,” she said of Slater. “There is no one on this earth with a better heart, and that is something that no bullshit tabloid can rewrite in real life.”
When Slater got the SpongeBob role, he thought director Tina Landau may have seen in him a natural optimism akin to the titular sponge’s. I wonder, after these heavy few years, if he still identifies that way. He ponders aloud for a moment—he literally lets out a considered hmmm—and says, “I do still feel like a natural optimist. I think my definition of optimism has changed, though.
“People often say, ‘Whatever happens, it’s meant to be,’ and I’ve never really felt that way. Now I think, ‘Whatever happens, that’s how it is,’ and we’re going to work our hardest to act accordingly and do the best that we can to make it good, as exhausted as one might be. I think the optimism is no matter how fucking tired you are, you just keep working to make things good. Spread yourself thin if you need to. I think there’s an optimism there that things can be better if you play okay with the cards you’re dealt.”
As our lunch winds down, Slater has to run to meet Pailet for a pitch meeting, but before we part, I ask him how he’s hoping his career might look from here. He tells me he’s been getting that question a lot these days. I apologize; he says, “No, no. It’s such a good question.”
I clarify I meant it hypothetically, in an if-the-world-was-your-oyster kind of way.
“World is my oyster,” he theorizes, “I would say the three things that I really love are filmmaking, whether it’s TV or film; theater; and writing. And if the world is my oyster, I’m writing every day and working on the projects that I’ve been developing as a writer, I’m doing something in theater every year, and I’m making a movie every year. That’s my three-pronged approach.”
Having seen The Mask “1,000 times” as a child, one Hollywood career that Slater admires is that of its star, one of our contemporary physical-comedy greats. Carrey, he says, does “the thing that clowns do so well,” which is that he can act “so goofy, so over-the-top, so funny, and then can use all of those skills—all of those weird faces that he makes and weird physical comedy things that he does—to break your heart and show you something about yourself that you didn’t understand before.”
But he also admires Tracy Letts, a Steppenwolf Theater and Broadway veteran (and multiple Tony winner) whose career spans acting and writing for both stage and screen. “He writes for himself, writes for others, and then acts in other people’s things,” Slater explains. “I’ve been writing for myself the past little bit, but that’s, I think, also a function of being ‘early career’ in some ways. And I would love to get to a point where I’m not doing that. I like writing for other people.”
With a sure blockbuster like Wicked in the wings, Slater is no longer in his “early career” stage, even if he’s not totally clear on where this road goes next.
“I’ve always had this feeling. I was a wrestler in high school—very, very into it—and I feel the same way that I did before a match as I do before a show, which is like, ‘When’s it going to start? When’s it going to start?’ But also, ‘Maybe don’t start. Maybe also, let’s not do it. Can we just call it off? No, let’s do it. Can we do it right now? Can we please do it right now? I don’t want to do it at all. I never want to do it again.’ I feel like there’s a lot of that feeling…. Part of me is like, you want to hold onto something.”
He pauses for a millisecond—perhaps reminding himself, as a wrestler might, that this match could actually go in his favor. “I don’t know that I feel that way, actually. I can’t wait for people to see it. I take it back.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Caroline Tompkins
Styled by Brandon Tan
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Grooming by Laramie using Oribe
