As one of the biggest pop culture icons to emerge from the “Nickelodeon child star” system, Ariana Grande has gone on to attain millions more fans who maybe weren’t the right age to invest in her character Cat Valentine. So it was curious, if perhaps expected, when the Victorious vet remained largely mum surrounding the release and subsequent aftermath of Investigation Discovery’s controversial Quiet on Set docuseries. Now, in the months ahead of her big screen arrival in the fairy tale musical Wicked, Grande has finally spoken out about it.
Appearing on the podcast Podcrushed, co-hosted by her “The Boy Is Mine” music video co-star Penn Badgley, the Grammy-winning artist understandably didn’t offer up an extremely detailed and categorized account of her years at Nickelodeon. But she also didn’t make a point of sugarcoating anything, saying that a lot of the more negative realizations about her experiences came through hindsight.
When talking about the changing of tides in the entertainment industry, Grande agreed she's having to reprocess things, and championed the idea that other occupational areas are looking inward as well. In her words:
I think it's kind of like in any work environment. I'm glad that this conversation is happening here, and also in the world, because it's also just kind of a cultural shift that's happening, where it's not just actors and singers and whatever. If you ask anyone who's ever worked, ever if they've ever, you know, dealt with a boss that had a really bad ego and temper, or if they've been sexually harassed or even assaulted, it's everywhere.
One of her biggest contentions with this side of the business is that even beyond the damaging and devastating things that are being done to young professionals, the acts are treated as being just an everyday part of the job and cycle, when that should not be the case. As she put it:
We're told it's normal, and it's changing. And I think that's a really nice place to see the world in unison, standing in a place where we're like, 'That's changing. That's unacceptable.'
While nothing about the Quiet on Set revelations has been easy for anyone to deal with, the undeniably positive takeaway is that it's put a far brighter spotlight on how young actors are treated on these kinds of projects.
Ariana Grande Says Envelope-Pushing Was Championed, And Parents On Set Were Not
Though Ariana Grande, who reportedly turned down a Quiet on Set interview, doesn't ever seem to imply that she experienced anything personally traumatizing during her years working on Nickelodeon productions, she did say that as kids, they were made to believe they should be pumped about all the gross-out humor and sexually charged gags, especially when those gags got the producers laughing while standing around the monitors. According to Grande:
Speaking specifically about our show, I think that was something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us is that we pushed the envelope with our humor and the innuendos; we were told and convinced as well that it was the cool differentiation. And I don't know, I think I it just all happened so quickly, and now looking back on some of the clips, I'm like, 'That's...damn, like, really?' I just think about, it's like, 'What if I had a daughter?'
One of the easiest ways to get a kid on board with something is to act as if theyre getting away with something in the process by doing it. Sidestepping authority is catnip to a tween,
Unfortunately, even when the network execs took issue with some of the on-screen shenanigans that Dan Schneider was pottentially repsonsible for, it didn't necessarily mean those ideas went away completely. As Grande points out, there were other ways for the creative team to get their innuendo in front of viewers.
There's a bottom line. And then the things that weren't approved for the network were snuck onto, like, our website or whatever it was. That is another discovery. Going into it, I guess I'm upset. Towards the end, my mom was allowed to come to set when I was [older].
When asked by one of the Podcrushed co-hosts about parents only being allowed to visit the set later on in Grande's TV career, the musician clarified by saying:
When we were younger, they were allowed to come to run through sometimes, or things like that occasionally, I think. But yeah, towards the end she was there a little more. And we've been talking a lot about this recently.
What seems like a red flag now — parents not being allowed on the set during the filming process — may have seemed perfectly normal at the time, possibly as a way to keep the actors from being distracted. Thankfully, that seemed to change even during the time while Grande was still heading up a show.
Like Grande, All That vet Kenan Thompson has done more reflecting recently about his own experiences during those days, and his own past being different from others. Which he spoke out after former co-star Lori Beth Denberg opened up about her potentially problematic friendship with Dan Schneider. The latter has since filed a lawsuit against Investigation Discovery and the producers.
