What the hell was going on on the Wicked set?

“Films are so weird now,” Hugh Grant lamented back in March. “You know, in the old days, by the end of the second week, you were all getting drunk in the evening and having dinner and falling in love with each other and all that.” Perhaps Ariana Grande took that as a challenge, because she’s bringing back Old Hollywood in a big way. In the wake of the Wicked shutdown, she’s sparked a new wave of tabloid drama that has the Internet in a tailspin.

Grande is not new to having her personal life become public discussion (see: the Pete Davidson era). But she’s kept deceptively quiet over the past few years. She got married and released an album during the pandemic, when pop stars couldn’t do traditional promo. Entrenched in her normie era, she released makeup and served as a judge on The Voice. She bided her time before fulfilling a lifelong dream: being cast as Glinda in the Wicked movie. And that’s when things started to get interesting again.

If you believe the tabloids—and yes, we’re going to have to do some suspension of disbelief with the TMZ citations in this one, folks—Grande and her husband Dalton Gomez couldn’t hack it long-distance in a post-pandemic world. Grande first officially stepped out as a (supposedly) single girl at Wimbledon with her Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey, where they sat with Andrew Garfield, to the delight of all. Hanging out with your gay BFF in the aftermath of a breakup is a time-honored tradition of many a theater kid, and Arianators everywhere welcomed this signal that a new era was on the horizon.

Yet there was another twist in the story to come, another classic theater kid tradition to honor: the showmance. Enter Ethan Slater, Broadway’s SpongeBob SquarePants and Wicked’s Boq. Slater was reportedly married to his high school sweetheart, Lilly Jay, and the couple had recently welcomed their first child together when he met Grande on the set of Wicked. The young family even reportedly hung out with Grande when Jay came to visit the set. “Ariana met their baby and even held him,” a source for the Daily Mail claimed. “They had dinners together in London—and Ariana told Lilly that she wanted to have a baby one day and that she couldn’t wait to start a family.”

Instead of starting a family, though, this occasion appeared to mark the end of one. Shortly after Wimbledon, news broke that Grande and Slater were dating. Sources from the new couple’s camp claimed that they had both been separated from their respective spouses for some time before they hooked up, but the Internet cast many aspersions on this version of events. After all, this is the woman with a single called “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored.” Many assumed this was an on-set affair.

Lilly Jay did not confirm the cheating rumors, but she didn’t deny them either. She did call up a few tabloids to talk trash. “[Ariana’s] the story really. Not a girl’s girl. My family is just collateral damage. The story is her and Dalton,” she told Page Six. To TMZ, she said she was “watching with horror as stories are published speaking to my experience.” Slater’s ex stated, “I’m focused on my son and doing my best to navigate a spotlight I have never wanted or experienced before. … I am asking for privacy and respect as an individual who is not in the entertainment industry and as a mom. I ask to be left alone to rebuild my life and raise the beautiful boy I gave birth to last year.”

Slater reportedly officially filed for divorce from Jay this week, though neither he nor Grande has made any official statement on their alleged relationship. While some may find the tabloid fodder of it all distasteful, it’s certainly the kind of juicy on-set drama that would make Hugh Grant proud. Now to get that strike settled so Wicked can wrap up and the rest of us can see what all the fuss is about.