3 months ago
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Ariana Grande is opening up about her time at Nickelodeon. The 30-year-old “The Boy Is Mine” singer appeared on the latest episode of Podcrushed, hosted by her most recent music video’s co-star, Penn Badgley. During the conversation, she opened up about being a child star, and her relationship to fame, as well as her time on Victorious and Sam & Cat as Cat Valentine. Keep reading to find out more… “I was 14 and I flew out to audition with Liz Gillies for Victorious, and we were all very excited and we got cast and it was the best news we could hear,” she recalled. “We were young performers who just wanted to do this with our lives more than anything, and we got to and that was so beautiful. I think we had some very special memories, and we feel so privileged to have been able to create those roles and be a part of something that was so special for a lot of young kids.” Ariana added that now she’s “reprocessing [my] relationship to it a little bit now, if that makes sense.” While Dan Schneider wasn’t directly addressed, nor the Investigation Discovery documentary Quiet on Set, Ariana said it’s been “devastating” to hear stories from former child actors, calling them “survivors.” (Dan Schneider is currently suing the documentary’s producers for defamation.) “I think the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting, and I think there should be therapists,” Ariana says. “I think parents should allowed to be wherever they want to be, and I think not only on kids’ sets. If anyone wants to do this, or music, or anything at this level of exposure, there should be in the contract something about therapy is mandatory twice a week or thrice a week, or something like that.” “I was actually talking to Max Martin about this the other day, because he was always such an amazing person to talk to about the stressful parts of what I was experiencing,” Ariana went on to say. “And he was just amazing, but a lot of people don’t have the support that they need to get through being a performer at that level at such a young age…the environment just needs to be made a lot safer all around and like I said I’m still in real time reprocessing my relationship to it.” She added that a positive to come out of the experience was “that Liz and I got to fall in love with these characters that we created, and learn what it feels like to be so in a character that you can’t separate yourself from it. But yeah, the rest of it is still being worked on.” Ariana also expressed some discomfort about Victorious in retrospect. “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,” she said. “And the innuendos were…it was like the cool differentiation. And I don’t know, I think it just all happened so quickly and now looking back on some of the clips I’m like, ‘Damn, really? Oh s–t’…and the things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck on to like our website or whatever…I guess I’m upset, yeah.” See the biggest allegations from Quiet on Set. Listen to her talk about her experience…
