Ariana Grande has claimed she used to be “infatuated with serial killers” — and has receipts to prove it.
The Into You singer admitted to it when Penn Badgley, who played a murderer on Netflix’s You, noted that the singer had cast both himslef and fellow actor Evan Peters — who famously portrayed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer — in two of her latest music videos.
“I knew someone was gonna say this,” Ariana told the actor on his Podcrushed podcast, in an interview released on Monday.
“Like, ‘Why the fuck? What is this pattern? Do we need to talk about this pattern here?’ Maybe there’s something to look at. No, I’m kidding.”
The Grammy winner wasn’t joking at a past Q&A session “with young fans”, however, when a child inquired who her dream dinner guest would be. Ariana responsibly asked the parents if she could “give the real answer,” before delivering a true showstopper.
“And they were like, ‘Sure, I guess, what’s the answer?’” Ariana recalled. “And I was like, ‘I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer is pretty fascinating. I think I would have loved to have met him. Y’know, maybe with a third party or someone involved. But I have questions.’”
“The parents were like, ‘We’ll explain it later, sweetie,’” she continued. “And I was like, ‘I’ll just sing Problem and go home.’”
Dahmer killed 17 people between 1978 and 1991 and was convicted on 15 counts of murder and sentenced in 1992 to 15 life terms in prison. The “Milwaukee Cannibal” had primarily targeted Black low-income victims in Wisconsin — and famously ate some of their bodies.
He was ultimately beaten to death in November 1994, by a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, which served as the conclusion to Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022), with Evan Peters in the lead.
Penn softened the seriousness of the subject by arguing Grande inherited her horror obsession from a mother who “loves Halloween” — who would likely camp her family around a fire to tell spooky stories if TV didn’t exist.
“Yeah!” Ariana agreed. “It’s the best.”
