Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey's pizza-making chemistry is pretty cute in the NYT Cooking kitchen

Of all the places where I would have expected to see the cast of Wicked promote Wicked: For Good, it would never have been NYT Cooking, but here we are, an almost 20-minute video of Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey making pizzas in the NYT kitchen.

The entire cast is close – as we have seen, and as has been memed to death at this point – but the closeness started early with Ari and Jonny, as they call each other. They were hanging out off-set during production, most famously at Wimbledon, where she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, kicking off the speculation about her marriage.

And by the way, for anyone wondering if Ariana and Ethan Slater are still together, I have it on the best authority that as of last week they were still very much a couple.

That said, Ari and Jonny’s chemistry is pretty cute. I mean, watching them make pizza isn’t Timothée Chalamet’s Zoom call but there are some fun and weird moments. For example, she’s Italian and grew up in a home where her grandmother was always cooking but she clearly has none of these skills. Her pizza making is borderline unenthusiastic which was making me crazier and crazier because all she wanted on it was sauce and vegan cheese but then she clearly felt awkward not doing anything while Jonathan was doing the most with his pizza so she kept reluctantly adding random ingredients, like broccolini. The takeaway for me was that it didn’t seem like there was a lot of joy going into the pizza – at least not the kind of joy that was matching Jonathan’s. I’m not saying I was into his pizza either, will pass on the artichokes, but he was approaching it with a lot of energy.

Where they did match was the silliness and it all came out when they were talking about breaking on set, particularly during the wedding scene because Ariana’s train was so unwieldy. The way Jonny imitates her is hilarious and Ari loses it when she sees him popping all the veins in his neck demonstrating what she looked like.

The other thing that fascinated me, and has for a while like everyone else I suppose, is how she speaks. Like a theatre actor now. Like the way people used to in old Hollywood movies. There’s a lot of Rosalind Russell going on here, and you don’t know that reference, do your celebrity homework kids!