It looks like Ariana Grande has applied a classic bit of kitchen wisdom to her romantic life: Sometimes, you gotta toss the sponge. TMZ and other news outlets reported on Monday that Grande and Ethan Slater, her Wicked co-star whose other biggest claim to fame is having played SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway, ended their three-year relationship several months ago.
It’s a decidedly anticlimactic conclusion for a couple whose early relationship was an all-out scandal. In July 2023, news sources reported that Grande and Slater got together while filming the first Wicked movie in London—and that it may have started while both of them were still married to other people: Grande to real-estate agent Dalton Gomez, and Slater to his high school sweetheart, Lilly Jay, with whom he shared an infant son. That timeline has never been completely cleared up in the intervening years—Grande and Slater’s camps insisted that there was no overlap, but if nothing else, it all certainly looked messy.
Though it can’t have been fun to weather the “homewrecker” allegations that followed and the frenzy surrounding her new relationship, Grande ultimately seemed to earn more side-eye than flat-out condemnation. Together, she and Slater promoted two blockbuster Wicked movies and tried, mostly successfully, to keep a low profile with their relationship. If anything, Slater bore the brunt of the ire. While he may have deserved this from a moral standpoint, the criticism he got was often less about morals and more about calling him ugly or awkward. In addition to being known as Grande’s main sponge, his biggest pop culture moments have been a widely memed dance through Jennifer Hudson’s spirit tunnel and a one-sided feud with a TikTok creator who hated his Wicked character.
The breakup also seems more poised to negatively impact his career than hers. Just about anyone could have predicted that this is how things would go for him. Of course it was inadvisable for a new father to (allegedly) blow up his life to be with a fickle pop star who was going to drop him eventually. TMZ’s report included the telling detail that the two have been broken up for several months already—did they wait to drop this news until Wicked promotion was over and Grande was starting a new tour? “We just needed the oscar nom it was nothing personal,” wrote one Grande fan on X, including Slater’s handle.
Grande, meanwhile, remains a mostly beloved pop star with a new album on the way in July, no matter how jarring it sometimes felt to attempt to square her prim red-carpet persona while promoting Wicked with her romantic track record. On some level, such dramatics are exactly what many of us are looking for in a pop star. Grande’s breakup with Pete Davidson, after all, is how we got “Thank U, Next.” Another thing about Grande is that she’s always been good at moving on. And speaking of Davidson, not for nothing, some gossip sites have pointed out he’s newly single again too. Is it time for BDE: the sequel?
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