Ariana Grande Shares Safety Concerns for Child Actors

By Movieguide® Contributor

Broadway star, TV actress and Grammy award-winning singer Ariana Grande is reflecting on the impropriety in the shows she performed in as a teenager.

“While some of her early beginnings took place on children’s shows, Grande recalled some of the adult jokes written in the scripts,” Uproxx reported. “On an episode of Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast, she looks back at some of the shows’ material and feels a sense of discomfort.”

She shared she’s “reprocessing” what she went through as a child and teen.

“I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting, and I think there should be therapists, I think there should be parents allowed to be wherever they want to be. Not only on kids sets,” Grande said. “I think if anyone wants to do this or music or anything at any level of exposure that it means to be on TV or to do music with a major label or whatever, [it] should be in the contract.”

Quiet on Set

Grande performed in Nickelodeon’s VICTORIOUS and SAM AND CAT, which were both created by Dan Schneider, who was accused of abuse and writing adult jokes into scripts. Schneider is the main subject of the recent documentary, QUIET ON SET: THE DARK SIDE OF KIDS TV.

Part of Movieguide®’s review of the doc reads:

QUIET ON SET: THE DARK SIDE OF KIDS TV is an important five-part documentary exposé streaming on Max. The documentary miniseries discusses the abuse occurring on several Nickelodeon programs produced by Dan Schneider, who got his start starring on ABC-TV’s popular sitcom HEAD OF THE CLASS in the late 1980s. As he succeeded in producing hit after hit for Nickelodeon, Schneider allegedly became more volatile and abusive with the increase of his power. Episodes Three and Four focus on a case involving the dialogue and acting coach, Brian Peck, for the program DRAKE & JOSH, who was convicted of abusing the program’s star, Drake Bell.

QUIET ON SET makes clear that children between 8 and 15 are extremely vulnerable and need to be protected from exploitation. Every aspect of this series is important for exposing the underside of Hollywood. QUIET ON SET has a very clear, strong moral worldview, with a few brief mentions of prayer. Although there’s very little visual sex or violence and practically no foul language in QUIET ON SET, MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution because of the subject matter.

“A lot of people don’t have the support that they need to get through performing at that level at such a young age, but also dealing with some of the things that the survivors who have come forward…,’ Grande said, referring to the doc, “there’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear.”

The pop star believes children’s developing minds and desire to please are “taken advantage of” for producers’ gains.

“There’s also a strange pattern that occurs,” Grande said, “where it’s taken advantage of how much it means to the young performer to [make producers laugh], like ‘Oh… I’m doing something great! This is funny; this is good!’ … Specifically, thinking about our show, that was something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us, we were pushing the envelope with our humor. And the innuendos were… like the cool differentiation.”

She now looks back at her Nickelodeon content with a different perspective.

“It’s…like, really? I think, ‘If that were my daughter’, you know?” she said.

“I dont know, I think it just all happened so quickly,” She continued, “and now looking back on some of the clips, I’m like… the things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck onto like our website or whatever. I guess I’m upset, yeah.”

Movieguide® recently reported on Nickelodeon star Drake Bell’s abuse:

“The things that were happening to me were so — it’s a big word — but gruesome,” he said. “Not only is it really difficult to speak about and to put into words, but I’m also not really in an environment where I think [the documentary producers] would want to put that on national television. It’s too graphic.”