Ariana Grande spent nearly a decade trying to audition for Wicked

Ariana Grande is proving yet again that in her core, she’s really just a millennial theater kid who happened to get famous. Like a million other wide-eyed thespians who grew up watching Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel belt it out at the Tonys, Grande spent years dreaming of riding by bubble herself. Unlike the vast majority of those dreamers, she has the chops to do it.

But it didn’t come easy. Even though Grande has won two Grammys and sold almost 90 million records worldwide, securing her place in Jon M. Chu’s upcoming Wicked movies took a whole lot more than a magic wand. “I have never wanted something as badly as I did this,” the “yes, and?” singer said in a recent interview with Amazon Music’s Zach Sang, noting that the prep and audition process took a full six months while she “took lessons every single day while I was doing The Voice to get ready… I trained every single day… to transform my voice even. Everything about me, I had to deconstruct to prove to them that I could handle taking on this other person.”

Even with all of this painstaking work, Grande says she had “no expectations” that she would get the role. “I was just so excited to have the opportunity to audition,” she explained, revealing that she had been “hunting Marc Platt (a producer for both the movie and Broadway show) down for an audition since I was 20.” Finally hearing that she’d landed the gig was “the best day of my life,” she continued.

Wherever you stand on the somewhat controversial casting, it’s clear that the process has changed Grande—or at least her relationship with the material and her own work—for good. “The reason why I thought I loved Glinda since I was 10 years old is so not what makes us so adjacent to one another,” she reflected. “Something that Glinda has is this very sure sense of self… I think I, maybe before knowing Glinda and spending a lot of time with her, would cram myself into tiny little spaces and be kind of apologetic about what I come with and who I am… It’s fun to be forced to look in the mirror in certain ways.” “I love her so much more after spending so much time with her,” she continued. “She’s so strong.”

You can see Grande’s take on Glinda (opposite Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba) when Wicked: Part One premieres on November 27.