Ariana Grande is honoring her roots.
The actress and singer explained on The Hollywood Reporter‘s podcast Awards Chatter, which aired Monday, Feb. 3, that she chose to use her birth name, Ariana Grande-Butera, in the credits for Wicked “because that is my full name.”
“It’s my birth name, and that was my name when I first saw Wicked when I was a young girl,” said the Academy Award nominee, 31. “And I feel like this experience was such a homecoming to myself, my young me, that maybe little pieces of her got lost along the way.”
“It felt like a homecoming to her, so this felt like a beautiful celebration of that homecoming and way of including my full me,” Grande added.
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The “imperfect for you” singer previously spoke out about using her birth name in the credits for the Jon M. Chu-directed Wicked, an adaptation of the hit 2003 Broadway musical.
When Grande and her costar Cynthia Erivo sat down for an interview with podcaster and journalist Justin Hill, he noted that Grande is credited with her “full grown-up name” on screen, adding, “I wanted to know the symbolism of the importance of that for you.”
“Technically, it’s my little girl name. It’s technically little [Ari’s] name,” she replied. (Grande is her mother Joan’s last name; Butera is her father Ed’s. The two divorced when their daughter was 8 years old.)
“I feel like I came home to myself in a lot of ways through what I learned from Glinda, from Elphaba,” she added, referencing the characters she and Erivo, 38, play. “That was my name when I went to see the show when I was 10 years old, and it felt like a really lovely way of honoring that. It felt really full-circle.”
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Grande received her first career Oscar nomination on Jan. 23, when she joined fellow nominees Monica Barbaro, Felicity Jones, Isabella Rossellini and Zoe Saldaña in the Best Supporting Actress category for the upcoming ceremony on March 2.
“Picking my head up in between sobs to say thank you so much to @theacademy for this unfathomable recognition. I cannot stop crying, to no one’s surprise,” Grande wrote in a caption to an Instagram post she shared shortly after the nomination announcement.
The actress and singer shared a photo of herself as a toddler dressed similarly to Judy Garland’s iconic Wizard of Oz character Dorothy, as well as an undated video of her singing portions of “Defying Gravity” from Wicked and photos of her in costume as Glinda, with Erivo.
“I’m humbled and deeply honored to be in such brilliant company and sharing this with tiny ari who sat and studied Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow just before the big, beautiful bubble entered. I’m so proud of you, tiny,” Grande wrote in her post.
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