Paul Mescal and Ariana Grande bond over their theatre kid histories

Ariana Grande and Paul Mescal don’t seem like the most natural of matches but they have something that bonds them like super glue.

The headline acts of the “Glicked” phenomenon — named after the simultaneous release of Wicked and Gladiator II last month — are self-confessed theatre kids.

Theatre kids are a special sort. They’re earnest and effusive, and very, very enthusiastic. Which is exactly why Grande’s Wicked five-city promotional tour with co-star Cynthia Erivo has been so divisive.

Mescal fell on the “for it” side. “I’m watching you guys on the press tour, you’re obviously in love with each other,” he told Grande during their Variety Actor-on-Actor chat.

“Insufferable, yes. We’re horrible, it’s bad,” Grande replied in jest, but also clearly aware that her and Erivo’s love-in has attracted some less-than-flattering commentary.

The pair have been inseparable and coordinated in public appearances all year, well before the press tour officially began in Sydney in November.

Mescal revealed to Grande that he saw Wicked in New York City, “the best place to see it”, referring to the film’s Broadway history. Grande seemed to understand why the combo of movie and location was significant to Mescal, confessing she had seen YouTube clips of him onstage as Javert in a youth production of Les Miserables he did when he was 16.

“With the dodgy mutton chops,” he recalled. The Gladiator 2 star said he fell in love with acting earlier that year when he was in Phantom of the Opera. “I have this theory: My parents met onstage doing Pirates of Penzance,” he told Grande. “So, I have this weird thing that somewhere in my blood, or in my heart or head, that the act of being onstage feels like an important place.

“Dad was the pirate king and my mum was one of the maids. Thank god for that production, because I wouldn’t be here.”

Since he became a professional actor in 2017, Mescal has tread the boards a few times (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Streetcar Named Desire) but none have been in a musical. He is in a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, playing the lead role of Franklin. But no one will see that movie for a while because director Richard Linklater is planning to shoot it over 20 years to reflect the reverse-chronological ageing of the story.

He first rolled cameras in 2019. Mescal joined the cast in 2022, replacing Blake Jenner.

Grande told Mescal the first Broadway show she ever saw was Beauty and the Beast, and remembered “loving it so much” but that when she was a kid, she would watch and study Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.

“I remember it being such an escape.”