four years of red dye, two shows, and the hardest possible starting position for being taken seriously — which took most of a decade to undo.
the short answer
she played cat valentine on nickelodeon's victorious from 2010, when she was seventeen, and then in the spin-off sam & cat. the role required dyeing her hair red continuously for four years, and it gave her the hardest possible starting position for being taken seriously as a musician — a framing it then took most of a decade to dismantle.
before nickelodeon
the thing worth establishing first: victorious is not where the career started. she was cast in the broadway musical 13 at fourteen, in 2008, and there is a 2009 web series in the filmography that predates nickelodeon entirely.
so the sitcom is the interruption in the story rather than the origin of it, and almost every account of her career gets that backwards.
the show
victorious ran from 2010, and cat valentine — sweet, red-haired, operating on a slightly different frequency from everybody else in the room — was a supporting part that quickly became one of the show's most recognisable. it was followed by sam & cat, a crossover spin-off pairing her with jennette mccurdy's character from icarly, which ran for a single season.
the cast photograph on this page is from the 2012 emmys, which is roughly the peak of that period and about a year before her debut album arrived and started the long process of changing the subject.
what it cost
- her hair. four years of bleaching and re-dyeing red, which is the actual origin of the ponytail and not a stylist's idea.
- the framing. "nickelodeon kid who got lucky" is a description she spent from 2013 to about 2018 dismantling — not by rebelling against it loudly, but by making records that were harder to dismiss each time.
- the assumption of manufacture. a teenager on a network sitcom is assumed to be a product. that assumption is why the whistle notes were widely assumed to be studio work until there was enough unprocessed live footage to settle it.
how she got out of it
not by disowning it. she has been consistently warm about the show and about the people on it, and there is a nickelodeon voice credit and a family guy appearance in the filmography that she had no obligation to take.
the escape route was the work itself: yours truly in 2013 is a 90s r&b record with live strings, which is not a thing a network is going to hand a teenage sitcom actor, and every album after it moved further from what the framing predicted. by wicked the question had stopped being asked.
questions people ask
who did ariana grande play in victorious?
cat valentine, a supporting character she played from 2010 and then carried into the spin-off sam & cat.
how old was ariana grande in victorious?
seventeen when the show began in 2010.
what was sam & cat?
a crossover spin-off pairing her cat valentine with jennette mccurdy's sam puckett from icarly. it ran for one season.
did ariana grande dye her hair for victorious?
yes — cat valentine is red-haired and hers is dark brown, so it was bleached and re-dyed continuously for about four years. the damage that caused is why the high ponytail exists.
was victorious ariana grande's first job?
no. she was cast in the broadway musical 13 in 2008, two years earlier, and there is a 2009 web series credit before nickelodeon as well.