Ariana Grande wanted to "honour" her younger self with her credit in 'Wicked'.
The 31-year-old pop megastar is playing the role of Glinda the Good Witch in the big-screen adaptation of the smash hit Broadway musical and has chosen to have herself listed in the cast list under her full name of Ariana Grande-Butera as a tribute to the "little girl" she was when she fell in love with the show.
She told Hit Network: "Technically, it's my little girl name. It's little Ari name. This experience was such a homecoming for me, I feel like I came home to myself in a lot of ways in what I learned from Glinda, from Elphaba. That was my name when I was 10 years old and it felt like a really lovely way of honouring that. It felt really full circle and just something that I wanted to do."
'Wicked' tells the unofficial backstory of 'The Wizard of Oz' and focuses on how Elphaba (Cynthia Ervio) becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, whilst her classmate Glinda goes on to become known as the Good Witch in the magical land.
The musical is based on the book by Gregory Maguire, and the musical opened in 2003 with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenworth in the leading roles of Elphaba and Glinda, respectively.
The 'Into You' hitmaker recently insisted that she always knew she had to "earn" the coveted role and quashed the notion that she had just been handed it because of her celebrity status.
Speaking on the 'Sentimental Men' podcast, she said: "People sometimes say that to me, like, 'You had to audition?' Of course! It's 'Wicked'. It requires a totally different skill set than people know me for or have ever seen me do anything like.
"It's 'Wicked'. That's the most respectful thing, it has to be earned. It can work against me, in certain ways because when you have this caricatured persona that's out there and people know you very well as this one thing...is this person going to be able to erase that? This isn't about me."
