Ethan Slater
Ethan Slater is an actor, born 1992.
Broadway asked Ethan Slater to play a sponge. The SpongeBob musical opened in 2016 with him in the title role, and the job was to make a cartoon character legible on a stage using nothing but a human body, a task with no obvious precedent. It won him a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical, and a filmed version, The SpongeBob Musical: Live on Stage!, exists so that you can see what he actually did with it.
Screen work arrived at an angle. He was Joel Grey in Fosse/Verdon in 2019, a strange assignment for a young actor, playing a real performer whose entire style was mannerism. Then Wicked cast him as Boq, the munchkin carrying a hopeless crush on Glinda, a part that grows considerably in Wicked: For Good, where he is billed as Boq and The Tin Man.
Since then he has been widening the range on purpose: a guest turn on Elsbeth, a period survival drama in Lost on a Mountain in Maine, and Thomas Godolkin in the 2025 season of Gen V, with the prequel Vought Rising ahead of him. He also releases music under his own name, two EPs so far, Wanderer and Life Is Weird. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1992, he is at the point where the theatre reputation and the film career have finally met.
Movies (7)
TV (3)
Where to start with Ethan Slater
Wicked is how most people will meet him, and Boq is a good measure of the skill: a supporting comic part inside an enormous film, played small enough not to compete with it. Wicked: For Good gives the character somewhere darker to go.
The better performance is the stage one. The SpongeBob Musical: Live on Stage! preserves the role he built his reputation on, and it is far stranger and more athletic than the source material suggests. Watch it before you decide what kind of actor he is.
After that, Fosse/Verdon for the technical challenge of playing Joel Grey, Gen V for the version of him allowed to be unpleasant, and Lost on a Mountain in Maine for the straight dramatic work. Elsbeth is a pleasant hour of network television and nothing more than that.