Wicked star Ethan Slater prefers to keep his family life under the radar.
“I try not to tell stories about my son because I want to let him meet the world and let the world meet him on his own terms,” Slater, 33, said on a recent episode of Gianmarco Soresi’s “The Downside” podcast. “So, I don’t tell stories or anecdotes [about him].”
Slater welcomed his son, whose name has not been shared publicly, with ex-wife Dr. Lilly Jay in August 2022. The now-exes, who were high school sweethearts, separated the next year as he filmed the Wicked movies in London alongside Slater’s now-girlfriend, Ariana Grande. (Grande, who was married to Dalton Gomez before production began, and Slater denied any relationship overlap at the time.)
Slater and Jay settled their divorce in September 2024 and now coparent their son.
“[Being a dad] is the best thing in the world,” Slater told GQ in a 2024 profile, briefly discussing their coparenting arrangement. “It’s been an interesting thing to navigate as a new parent. There’s nothing I want to do more than just show you pictures and talk about him because he’s the best and the light of my life.”
While Slater has mostly kept his familial memories to himself, he briefly opened up to Soresi, 37, about celebrating Hanukkah with his only child.
“Having that moment of lighting candles with him and talking about what it means to be Jewish has been a really interesting experience,” he said on “The Downside” late last month. “I’m grateful for that in a sea of not being grateful for a lot of other things. I’ve been finding some hope in that.”
Slater practices Judaism, calling himself a “regressive Jewish person in the world.”
“It’s been a very weird time to be, I would say, a regressive Jewish person in the world. It’s been a very hard time with the conflation of state ideologies with your religion that, in my view, are very different things,” the Tony Award nominee explained, addressing the topic of antisemitism. “They become conflated in every way, and I think that’s really disastrous.”
He continued, “There have been a lot of different kinds of tragedies that have been happening, like, having this shooting in Sydney, Australia, and, over the past years, the horrible atrocities being committed so often in our name. To have all these things happening at once has been a really crazy thing, and it becomes hard.”
Amidst the fatal shootings targeting Jewish populations and the state of Israel’s wartime actions, Slater has leaned on his inner circle to help understand his personal identity.
“It’s hard to figure out how to move forward,” he said. “I think sort of the small communities and connecting with family and loved ones has been a really helpful path for me to figure out what it means to be Jewish and also politically away in the world.”
Slater added, “There are a lot of American Jews who are trying to separate what we were taught at Jewish schools [and] through our synagogues that felt inseparable as kids because we were so young. … There is a generation that is working really hard to do that.”
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