Ariana Grande says she's "reprocessing" her history with Nickelodeon
While she didn't name it explicitly, the conversation was clearly inspired by the Quiet On Set documentary, which detailed a number of abuses at the network
Ariana Grande is “reprocessing [her] relationship” to Nickelodeon, the network that originally made her name. The former Victorious star’s comments come in the wake of the release of the Quiet On Set documentary, which detailed allegations of sexual harassment and child abuse against the network and its primary producer, Dan Schneider.
“I think the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting, and I think there should be therapists,” Grande said on Podcrushed, the podcast hosted by her “the boy is mine” music video co-star, Penn Badgley. “I think parents should be allowed to be wherever they want to be, and I think not only on kids’ sets. If anyone wants to do this, or music, or anything at this level of exposure, there should be in the contract something about therapy is mandatory twice a week or thrice a week, or something like that.”
While footage of some of the innuendos Grande’s Victorious character was forced to perform factored heavily into the documentary, the actor herself did not participate in the project and did not mention it or Schneider by name in her Podcrushed interview. She did, however, refer to the interviewees as “survivors,” saying that “there’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear about” what they went through.
While Grande does feel “so privileged to have been able to create those roles and be a part of something that was so special for a lot of young kids,” she reiterated multiple times that she was still reprocessing. “Specifically about our show, I think that was something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us—is that we pushed the envelope with our humor,” Grande explained. “And the innuendos were… it was like the cool differentiation. And I don’t know, I think it just all happened so quickly and now looking back on some of the clips I’m like, ‘Damn, really? Oh shit.’”
“The things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck on to like our website or whatever… and that is another discovery,” she added. “I guess I’m upset.”
You can watch Grande’s full Podcrushed conversation below: