On Thursday, Billie Eilish performed with Green Day and her brother Finneas at the FireAid concerts at the Forum and Intuit Dome. On Sunday, Eilish performed at the 2025 Grammy Awards. Two days later, the two-time Academy Award winner made her way to the DGA Theater in West Hollywood where she moderated a Q&A with another music legend and potential Oscar winner, Ariana Grande. A conversation following a SAG member screening of a movie Eilish has seen three times already, the 10-time Oscar and Best Picture nominated blockbuster, “Wicked.”
READ MORE: Cynthia Erivo pushed her body to extremes for ‘Wicked’
After the pair walked arm and arm on stage, to a “This is crazy” from Eilish, she shared, “I remember finding out you got the job through the internet and I was like ‘F**k yeah! That’s so sick. She’s wanted that for so long!'”
“Thank you,” Grande says.
Eilish says, “I didn’t even know you then! At all! And I was so excited. And I saw all of the paparazzi photos of you doing all the…” And Eilish can’t stop laughing and the audience can’t either. Grande says, “Thank you so much. I can’t believe that.” Eilish adds, “I’ve been rooting for you.”
It turns out Eilish has been rooting for Grande for a long time. She still has control of the Billie Eilish YouTube channel since she’s controlled since she was 11. She did a deep dive into her comments recently and made some discoveries.
“I was just in the car telling my mom there’s old interviews of you from 2014,” Eilish says.
“Oh God,” Grande says horrified.
“And silly Eilish comments like, ‘I’m Team Ari,'” Eilish says as the crowd once again bursts into laughter. “There’s many that I didn’t realize they were still up, but there’s many things where I commented like, ‘God, I just love Ariana so much,’ and I used to call you Ari. And my brother [would] be like, ‘Don’t call her Ari. You don’t know her.’ So, anyway, that makes me sound really excited. And isn’t this movie so amazing? I’m going to ask a few questions, which is not normal for me. I’m not usually on this side of it. I’m so excited.”
Grande injects, “You said yes. I still can’t believe she said yes to it. I’m so excited.”
Eilish continues, “O.K. where do I start? Well, first of all, this movie’s amazing. You’re so amazing. I’ve seen it three times. I listened to it before my shows and it is awesome and I love it so much. My first question would be, you’re like a diehard ‘Wicked’ fan, and I’ve known this about you as a fan for years and you’ve been talking about this for years. You’re such a diehard and I feel like the play so well and the music so well, and I feel like I just wanted to know going into it, what were things for you that were totally non-negotiable that you were like, ‘I’m not going to do it unless it’s exactly like the play in this way. ‘What were things that you were very particular about?”
“I do feel like in a way, the nerdy Oz historian that worked on the movie, I felt like a protective nerd, like the gatekeeping fan girl in the room,” Grande says. “And I’m somewhat of a purist when it comes to making musical changes, especially if it has to have an emotional attachment or some sort of believable intention behind it.”
Grande says she wanted to protect Glinda and the movie as much as possible. And when she heard that composer Stephen Schwartz had a new idea for “Popular,” she found herself at a crossroads. She’s also willing to share this story now since Schwartz has publicly.
She explains, “Steven Schwartz shared that there was a version of ‘Popular’ in the very beginning that had hip hop drums in it, drums, and ‘Oh my God, I was like, how do I have this conversation in the most loving, respectful way?’ I was like, ‘This cannot happen.’ How different would life be today if ‘Popular’ had trapped drums in it? There’s a time and place, and it’s not with Glinda because she claps on one and three and that’s O.K., but we have to be in character and she doesn’t have that kind of rhythm. And I just kind of mustered up the courage to say respectfully, I think maybe she doesn’t have that in her. We have to lead through the honesty of the story and little things like that.”
There was an “incredible responsibility of honoring the source material” while also breathing “new truths into it and finding new meaning for these lines that we’ve sung in the shower,” Grande says. “We can also create ours just through honesty. But yeah, the trap drums are just an example of finding that balance that didn’t happen, obviously.”
Eilish says, “I’m so glad you pushed for that.”
“Oh, me too,” Grande says. “Life would be so different. It would’ve really ruined everything.”
While Eilish may have inexplicably come home empty-handed from the Grammys after releasing her most critically acclaimed album, and one of the biggest hits of 2024 in “Birds of a Feather,” she’s still a nine-time winner at the age of 23. And even at that relatively young age, she knows a lot about singing and vocal training. That was a topic she asked Grande specifically about. Especially since Glinda sings out of her “traditional” range.
“First of all, I started training my voice three months before my first audition just because I wanted to have the muscles and my voice get used to singing in a very different way,” Grande says. “I’ve always had a high voice, but it’s very different than the register that I used to sing pop music, which is what I was mainly doing. And just like any other muscles in your body or vocal cords, just get used to what they’re trained slowly and surely and taught to do. And when I’m singing popup, I’m usually using my mix and my belt or whistles, but a little bit of falsetto in between. But Glinda lives in that falsetto, so it’s just kind of spending a lot more time there and then training your vowels and your consonants and your vibrato to act differently. And that’s such a pivotal piece of the puzzle when it comes to Glinda is that Coloratura authentic operatic soprano style singing.”
A two-time Grammy winner herself, Grande recalled a recent conversation with her vocal coach, Eric Vetro, about the long road to train her voice for the role.
“I went all the way back in my voice notes to our early lessons in 2021 and you can hear week by week sort of the airiness become fuller,” Grande shares. “It goes away and it sounds fuller and fuller as the weeks go by. So, just repetition and muscle training and being careful and cautious. And then by the time you get to set, you don’t have to think about that anymore because the muscles have developed a new thing, a new memory.”
When Eilish asked Grande about the audition process, Grande took a deep breath. The process was three months and she was excited they even took her seriously as a candidate for either role. She sang “No One Mourns the Wicked,” “Popular,” “The Wizard and I,” and “Defying Gravity,” but showed up completely in pink. She recalls, “It was obvious no one was hiding anything. I just think that they were very thorough.”
The auditions for the dramatic scenes were just as thorough. Grande remembers, “Tiffany from Bernard Telsey Casting had her little COVID mask on, but I could tell when we were doing the scene before ‘Popular,’ and she was my Elphaba in the audition, she was in the chair and just her eyes were smiling. I could tell under her mask. And it just made me feel that feeling like I just had such butterflies in that moment.”
Surprisingly, despite screen testing with two different Elphabas, neither was cast. Instead, the role went to Cynthia Erivo, who eventually earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance. Granda exclaims, “Crazy! Thank goodness. Can you imagine if we met? And it just went horribly wrong?”
Eilish says, “No!” (We couldn’t either.)
Her final screen test was three hours and Grande says she was a “basket case” by the end of it.
“I remember I was like, ‘I’ve left everything else in this room. You know what? I’m going to stick my lashes on the mirror.’ And I left them,” Grande says. “They were poking up. I’d been crying so much. And so I just left them there. So yeah, it was long and thorough as it should have been because these roles have to be earned. And we worked really hard and it was the most gratifying work ever.”And yeah, it is. The right thing won’t pass you by.”
“Yeah, you earned it, dude,” Eilish says.
“Thank you. Sorry, that was so long,” Grande says. “I went all the way back to my date of birth.”
Since the cast mostly sang live on set Eilish was also curious about continuity. How did she keep her voice consistent through so many takes filmed over almost a year and a half?
“When it comes to the singing side, I mean, you know what it’s like to do a tour,” Grande says to Eilish. “We’re doing so many shows in a row, and Cynthia and I are both Broadway girls. We know what it’s like to do eight shows a week. So, it’s imperative, I think, for the emotional integrity of what happens in the scenes. And also for Glinda, particularly the ability to improv. You can’t be married to a track, you can’t be sort of married to certain choices. You have to be able to have the freedom to surprise each other and play and make things up on the spot. Or if it’s an emotional scene, you’re not going to sound perfect. Your voice is going to crack. And that’s really special to preserve that and to have that option available. So, I think it’s just sort of what we love to do. We love to sing and we’re Broadway girls, and also there are so many amazing Glinda and Elphaba’s who do it eight shows a week. So, if we have to do it 27 takes in a row, we’re going to do it in solidarity with our sisters.”
Grande also gave a special shout-out to the film’s Oscar-nominated sound team. She adds, “Simon Hayes, our incredible sound team. They turned the whole set into a recording studio. So it’s like no matter what happened if a gust of wind came and hit this mic, there was a mic in Elphaba’s hat, so we’re covered. And then there was a boom over us, and then there were two on each one of my things [on my chest], and it was beautiful. They turned everything into a recording studio.”
The two music icons ended the conversation laughing over a prepared question Eilish was provided that essentially asked if Grande had caught the “acting bug.” Grande turned it into a comedic moment naively appalled that she might have a “bug.” But as for what’s next? She’d certainly “love” to act again, “But I’m thankful. I feel like I have so many beautiful artistic outlets and we are so lucky to be able to do so many artistic things. We wear many hats, and we’re so lucky to be able to do that. So yeah, the bugs are plenty. That wasn’t plenty for us.”
“Wicked” is still in theaters and available on PVOD and Peacock.
