Music
Ariana Grande’s “Boy Is Mine” Music Video Features Penn Badgley
The singer played with themes from the actor’s hit show You.
On June 7, Ariana Grande dropped a star-studded music video for “The Boy Is Mine.” Directed by Christian Breslaur — who also worked on “We Can’t Be Friends” and “Yes, And?” — the video features the singer and Gossip Girl star Penn Badgley.
Badgley plays a fictional mayor, Max Starling, who releases feral cats into the city to deal with a rat infestation. Grande’s character creates a “love potion” to make the mayor fall for her. Dressed in a Catwoman disguise, she attempts to give Starling the pink concoction, even though it’s later established that she never needed it — the mayor was already in love with her.
Following the video’s debut, many fans compared Grande’s role to the character Badgley plays in You, named Joe Goldberg. “Did Ariana Grande just out Joe Goldberg THE Joe Goldberg himself?” one fan joked on X (formerly Twitter).
On May 27, the singer treated fans to a first look at the music video on Instagram, and later teased Badgley’s role on TikTok with a video of him dancing to the track.
Badgley isn’t the only familiar face featured in the video. Brandy and Monica, who released a same-named song in 1998, play news anchors. Grande’s song, which is a reimagined version of theirs, serves as the third single from her seventh studio album, Eternal Sunshine.
Speaking to Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe in March, she revealed that she “always” had a desire to rework the 1998 hit. “In a way, I was kind of like, ‘This is a very bad idea.’ But there is a large group of my fans that really do love a bad girl anthem,” Grande said. “This is an elevated version of that.”
