A Munchkin’s Glow-Up and More Culture Picks

This story is from Manual, GQ’s flagship newsletter offering useful advice on style, health, and more, four days a week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Oz Fest

Ethan Slater was already, by some metrics, pretty famous—dude played Spongebob on Broadway with no special effects save a necktie and some squarish pants and got himself a Tony nomination for it. But when GQ’s Eileen Cartter caught up with him in New York City not long ago, she found Slater cautiously negotiating new territory like a veritable Sponge Out of Water (okay, that’s our last sponge joke this newsletter; thank you for your indulgence.)

At the end of next month, you’ll see Slater as an historically pivotal Munchkin in Wicked, the first half of Jon M. Chu’s blockbuster-in-waiting adaptation of the hit Broadway musical about good and bad witches, and he’s an even bigger part of the second Wicked film, which drops next year. Plus he’s dating Ariana Grande, his Wicked co-star and fellow Jim Carrey fan, so he’s got the gossip-press attention from that to contend with as well. It’s enough to make a man want to go live under the sea, in some sort of scaly yellow fruit—OK, that’s the last sponge joke—but for now Slater’s hanging in there, anxious yet focused, dreaming of a future in which he can leverage his physical-comedy skills to become another Carrey while also being the next Tracy Letts. That is such a specific lane that we want it to work out for him, just to see what that would look like: Ace Ventura Osage County, anyone?

Odder Future

Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia dropped this week at the convention-bucking and notably humane-to-online-culture-journalists hour of 6AM on Monday morning. It finds the Odd Future mastermind-turned-multihyphenate following up 2021’s no-crying-on-the-yacht award-tour album Call Me If You Get Lost with a decisive vibe shift—the rap-album equivalent, writes GQ’s Frazier Tharpe, “of a vacation hangover, coming home to find the real world and all its stresses lying in wait.”

It’s still a Tyler album, with all the ornery braggadocio and God-moving-over-the-face-of-Lake-Como beat-changes that entails, but the Creator is beginning to question his priorities after after years of accumulating Grammys, cars and private-jet miles while his real-world friends log more traditional game-of-life milestones (marriages, kids, etc): “They sharin’ pictures of these moments, shit is really cute/And all I got is photos of my ‘Rari and some silly suits.” As this is GQ, we can neither confirm nor deny that there’s more to life than silly suits, but it’s inspiring to watch Tyler work through these questions with the same blunt honesty and mordant wit he’s brought to everything he’s done since the days of the cockroach. Best rap album ever about turning 33 (aka “the gateway to 35”)? That, we can confirm.

Oddest Future

Lastly, but by no means least: ‘80s teen-movie actor turned semi-enthusiastic online-irony-industrial-complex participant Corey Feldman also sings and plays guitar and writes songs. Did you know that? Did you know that, this summer, Corey opened for Limp Bizkit on a tour that Limp’s always-I’m-rubber-you’re-glue-ing frontman Fred Durst dubbed “Loserville”? Having absorbed those two pieces of information, do you have follow-up questions? Then you’re going to want to check out GQ contributor Cole Louison’s epic account of a few days on the road with Feldman and Durst and the people in their respective orbits, which (we will humbly suggest) is the finest ten thousand word story you will ever read about the divergent yet converging lives and careers of two guys who met on Backgammon Night at the Playboy Mansion and the different bargains they’ve both struck with the world.