Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey Say Broadway Helped ‘Wicked’ Chemistry

Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey successfully danced through life on the Wicked set thanks to a shared Broadway background, the pair shared on Sunday.

“I feel like we were both very theater children in the room,” Grande told People. The pop star plays Glinda, the future Good Witch, who falls for Bailey’s Fiyero in Wicked. Bailey added that the “theater children” energy was “incessant.”

Grande made her Broadway debut at 15 in the musical Thirteeen, and Bailey was a child actor the Royal Shakespeare Company before moving on to West End productions like Les Misérables.

“We were very giggly together,” Grande added. “That was the tough thing with us. We were the giggliest pair. It carbonated our chemistry.”

“It gave us fizz,” Bailey added.

The “thank u, next” star said that she and Bailey were “falling for each other as friends in real life” while their characters fell for one another, too. “That was such a beautiful part of it. We had the most beautiful time,” she said.

Wicked, which also stars Cynthia Erivo in director Jon M. Chu‘s adaptation of the 2003 musical, has enjoyed a record-breaking run at the box office, earning $16.9 million on Thursday. It opened to $112 million last weekend to rank as the top-grossing adaptation of a Broadway musical. Bailey’s song, “Dancing Through Life,” topped charts upon the soundtrack’s release last week. The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney called the movie “a monster stage hit [that] makes a sparkling screen transition.”