How Wicked’s Ethan Slater Made It to Oz and Back

In her recent Vanity Fair cover story, Grande also spoke carefully about her partner. “No one on this earth tries harder or spreads themselves thinner to be there for the people that he loves and cares about,” she said of Slater. “There is no one on this earth with a better heart, and that is something that no bullshit tabloid can rewrite in real life.”

When Slater got the SpongeBob role, he thought director Tina Landau may have seen in him a natural optimism akin to the titular sponge’s. I wonder, after these heavy few years, if he still identifies that way. He ponders aloud for a moment—he literally lets out a considered hmmm—and says, “I do still feel like a natural optimist. I think my definition of optimism has changed, though.

“People often say, ‘Whatever happens, it’s meant to be,’ and I’ve never really felt that way. Now I think, ‘Whatever happens, that’s how it is,’ and we’re going to work our hardest to act accordingly and do the best that we can to make it good, as exhausted as one might be. I think the optimism is no matter how fucking tired you are, you just keep working to make things good. Spread yourself thin if you need to. I think there’s an optimism there that things can be better if you play okay with the cards you’re dealt.”

As our lunch winds down, Slater has to run to meet Pailet for a pitch meeting, but before we part, I ask him how he’s hoping his career might look from here. He tells me he’s been getting that question a lot these days. I apologize; he says, “No, no. It’s such a good question.”

I clarify I meant it hypothetically, in an if-the-world-was-your-oyster kind of way.

“World is my oyster,” he theorizes, “I would say the three things that I really love are filmmaking, whether it’s TV or film; theater; and writing. And if the world is my oyster, I’m writing every day and working on the projects that I’ve been developing as a writer, I’m doing something in theater every year, and I’m making a movie every year. That’s my three-pronged approach.”

Having seen The Mask “1,000 times” as a child, one Hollywood career that Slater admires is that of its star, one of our contemporary physical-comedy greats. Carrey, he says, does “the thing that clowns do so well,” which is that he can act “so goofy, so over-the-top, so funny, and then can use all of those skills—all of those weird faces that he makes and weird physical comedy things that he does—to break your heart and show you something about yourself that you didn’t understand before.”