The official ‘Thank, U Next’ 2.0 era.
In recent months, Ariana Grande had been keeping a very low profile while filming the two upcoming Wicked movies directed by Jon M. Chu.
Even though Grande originally broke into the mainstream for her acting role on the Nickelodeon series Sam & Cat, she mostly just focused on her music career in the years that followed – making very occasional appearances in projects like Scream Queens, Hairspray Live!, and Kidding.
As production started for the Wicked movies, Universal Pictures announced that Grande had been cast in the role of Galinda. She will star in the films alongside Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba), Jonathan Bailey (Fiyero), and Ethan Slater (Boq). While fans were definitely excited to see the movies, little did anyone know that a behind-the-scenes romance had been developing between Grande and Slater the whole time.
Now, a swarm of updates are being reported about this new relationship between the Wicked costars.
Scroll through for a timeline of all the recent updates regarding Ariana Grande’s dating life.
Ariana announces she is divorcing Dalton Gomez.
Instagram (@arianagrande)
Grande had high-profile relationships with celebrities like the late Mac Miller, Big Sean, and Pete Davidson over the years. However, it was upon meeting a non-famous real estate agent, Dalton Gomez, that Grande appeared to have found the love of her life. After meeting in January 2020, Grande and Gomez got engaged in December 2020 and tied the knot in May 2021.
In July 2023, seemingly out of nowhere, new reports came out claiming that Grande and Gomez were getting a divorce. Sources alleged that the couple had already been having issues for some time, and Grande being away for so long to film the Wicked movies ended up straining their relationship even further.
Ariana is now dating ‘Wicked’ costar Ethan Slater.
Instagram (@michelleyeoh_official)
Just a few days after Grande and Gomez’s divorce was reported, new stories came out alleging that the singer was now dating her Wicked costar Ethan Slater. In fact, TMZ spoke to “sources with direct knowledge” who claimed that Grande and Slater “started dating several months ago during production of the flick.”
The irony in this new romance is that Boq (Slater’s character) actually has a massive crush on Galinda (Grande’s character) in Wicked. However, Boq doesn’t stand a chance with Galinda as she pursues a relationship with Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey’s character) instead.
Ethan’s wife says she was ‘blindsided’ by Ariana dating news.
Instagram (@ethanslater)
Much like Grande, Slater was married to someone else when they started filming Wicked. Slater started dating Lilly Jay, his high-school sweetheart, in 2012. They got married in 2018 and had a child in 2022.
According to Page Six, Jay was “completely blindsided” by the news of Slater’s new relationship with Grande. “It’s horrible,” a source told the publication. “They were high school sweethearts. They have a baby! She’s a wreck.” In May 2023 – two months prior to the news that Grande and Slater were dating – the actor shared an Instagram post praising Jay as “the most wonderful mom/person in the world.”
Another report published by Us Weekly claims that “Ethan sat Lilly down a few days before the news broke about him and Ariana and said that he wanted a divorce.” Another insider alleged that “Ariana and Ethan weren’t careful. They’d hold hands on set in between takes. They were sloppy and not hiding it.”
‘SpongeBob’ voice actor’s wife clarifies Ariana is not dating her husband.
Instagram (@the_real_jill_talley)
Before getting cast in the Wicked movies, Slater was best known for playing the title character in The SpongeBob Musical on Broadway. When his new relationship with Grande came to light, fans on social media reacted with jokes like “Grande is now dating SpongeBob.”
Well, some people saw those jokes and actually understood that Grande was dating 61-year-old Tom Kenny, the voice actor from the original Nickelodeon show SpongeBob SquarePants. This prompted Kenny’s wife, Jill Talley, to go on Instagram and clarify this situation.
“Hi everyone, I’m married to Tom Kenny (who voices SpongeBob on the TV show),” Talley wrote. “He is not dating Ariana Grande. I don’t know if Ethan Slater (who played SpongeBob in the musical) is or isn’t dating Ariana Grande. However, they’re both adorable and I totally ship it. Just wanted to set the record straight.”
She concluded, “As for me and Tom Kenny – we are celebrating our 27th wedding anniversary today.”
Ethan’s ‘The SpongeBob Musical’ costar reacts to him dating Ariana.
Instagram (@lilcoopz)
Actress Lilli Cooper, who played Sandy Cheeks in The SpongeBob Musical alongside Slater, also had a reaction to the news that he was now dating Grande. “I was surprised,” she told Page Six. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while. It’s an interesting coupling, for sure. Unexpected.”
Ethan’s friends are worried Ariana will ‘break his heart.’
Instagram (@ethanslater)
A person who claims to be friends with Slater told Us Weekly that his group of close friends is concerned about his new relationship with Grande. According to this source, Slater’s friends are “worried she’ll break his heart.”
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.