Ariana Grande says Mac Miller helped her find herself — brown hair and all.
The “Wicked” star, 32, opened up about the late rapper’s influence on her career during a December appearance at Chapman University for The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which aired this week.
She made rare comments about her ex-boyfriend, revealing for the first time that Miller encouraged her to reclaim her natural brunette color and R&B sound as she transitioned from her Nickelodeon days.
“I’ve never talked about this, but actually Malcolm, who you might know as Mac, encouraged me to be myself,” Grande shared. He reassured her “that it was okay to kind of shed that character and embrace my brown hair and make R&B-influenced pop music and separate and do the brave thing.”
Grande and Miller first collaborated on her breakout 2013 single “The Way” from her debut album “Yours Truly,” which was released in August 2013. The pair didn’t go public with their romance until September 2016, three years after their musical partnership began, but she felt Miller’s influence from the beginning.
“That’s also a part of why I was so eager to ask him to be a part of it,” the Grammy winner explained. “Not only because he was so perfect for the song, but I also felt like I had him to thank for finding my sound.”
The couple dated until May 2018, splitting amicably before Miller’s death from an accidental overdose in September 2018 at age 26.
Grande began dyeing her hair red in 2009 for her role as Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon’s “Victorious,” and maintained the color through the 2014 cancellation of spinoff “Sam & Cat.” During the final years, she split her time between filming during the week and performing music on weekends.
“I think there was definitely a time when it was hard to do [acting and music] at the same time,” Grande recalled. She would tone her hair brown on Friday nights after wrapping filming, then do a clarifying rinse late Sunday to restore the red for Monday morning call times at 6 a.m.
“That completely destroyed my hair,” Grande wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post in 2014, explaining why she always wore her signature ponytail.
The singer has since embraced her natural brunette shade, showing off a rich, warm dye job in October after spending three years blond for her “Wicked” role. She told the Zach Sang show in 2020 that the red hair represented Cat Valentine, a character she loves but is “not me.”
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