Ethan Slater has revealed what it was like working with Ariana Grande and the all-star cast of the highly-anticipated Wicked film.
Slater, 32, stars as the Munchkin Boq in the film, and tells 9honey Celebrity at the red-carpet of the Australian premiere that he and the cast "bonded over time" while working together during the production.
The actor, who rose to fame on the Broadway show SpongeBob SquarePants, met Grande on the set of Wicked. The couple later began dating off-screen.
He praises his girlfriend Grande, 31, and the cast as being "warm and welcoming", adding, "Everybody's incredibly talented".
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Ethan Slater (far right) reveals how the all-star cast of Wicked 'bonded over time' on set. (WireImage)"I do think the theatre kid in all of us was a really helpful bonding thing," he says.
"Cynthia, Ariana, you know, Marissa [Bode] loves doing theatre. Johnny [Jonathan Bailey] obviously does theater. Jeff [Goldblum] loves it. Everybody is, like, you know, theater kids at heart," he explains.
"So I think we bonded over time, which is really nice.
"I think the best part about it is that not only was everyone really kind and warm and welcoming, everybody's incredibly talented and so you feel really safe doing scenes with everyone."
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"Not only was everyone really kind and warm and welcoming, everybody's incredibly talented." (WireImage)He went on to gush about his co-star Bode, who plays Nessarose.
"Marissa and I did a lot together. We did a lot of scenes where it was just the two of us and I felt just so like unbelievably safe with her as my scene partner," he says.
"She's amazing and brilliant and you guys are gonna fall in love with her."
He says "every single set was a 'pinch me' moment".
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Slater with his co-stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. (Instagram/ michelleyeoh_official)Slater also spoke about being in Australia, telling 9honey Celebrity, "I've only been here a little bit, I've never been here before, so I'm excited to discover the magical things.
"Flying over everything was just like beautiful, like actually very Oz-ian."
Wicked is set to hit theatres across Australia later this month, as part of a highly-anticipated two-part franchise.
The upcoming film is an adaptation of the 2003 Broadway musical of the same name and follows an unlikely friendship between students Elphaba and Glinda before the former's evolution to become the Wicked Witch of the West.
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Marissa Bode and Ethan Slater in Wicked. (Universal Pictures)The stage show and the film are based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Wicked takes audiences back into the beloved fictional Land of Oz as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, with some iconic characters popping up years before the events of the1939 movie.
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Grande stars as the bubble-travelling, pink-obsessed Glinda the Good Witch of the South, while Erivo takes on the titular role of the Wicked Witch in the new film.
Chu told Vanity Fair in a recent interview that singer Grande, 31, "auditioned many times" for the part in the film adaptation.
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The film stars Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum and Slater. (Universal Pictures)"I sort of didn't want to believe that she could do this. It seems almost too easy to say, 'Oh, Ariana Grande,'" Chu told the publication. But he admitted that soon Grande won him over.
"Every time she came in, she was the most interesting person," he said. "You just couldn't take your eyes away."
Of Erivo's audition, he said, "She embodied this version of Elphaba that I had never seen."
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