Ariana Grande Revealed The One Reason Her Real Name Is Credited In “Wicked”

“It felt like a really lovely way of honoring that.”
That’s right — Ariana’s birth certificate-certified name is actually Ariana Grande-Butera, and it’s under that name that Ariana is credited in the upcoming film adaptation of Wicked.

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Her legal name incorporates the last names of her mother, Joan Grande, and her father, Edward Butera.
Why now? Well, Ariana explained the decision in a recent interview with Australian radio station Hit104.7 Canberra.

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“Technically, it’s my little girl name!” she explained to the host, specifying that “It’s little Ari’s name.”
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“I just feel like this experience was such a homecoming for me,” she continued. “I feel like I came home to myself in a lot of ways through what I learned from Glinda, from Elphaba.”
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“That was my name when I went to see the show when I was 10 years old. It felt like a really lovely way of honoring that. It felt really full circle. It just felt like something I wanted to do.”
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