Show People with Paul Wontorek: Ethan Slater of SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

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SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS Tony nominee Ethan Slater discusses making the optimistic yellow cartoon his own, learning about loss, counting his blessings and other takeaways on SHOW PEOPLE WITH PAUL WONTOREK.

ON THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL HE CAN'T DELETE
“I have tried every password that I can remember to get back into that account. I cannot figure out how to get rid of those videos. I thought I was going to be a college wrestler; that was my path. My sophomore or junior year of high school, I started taking these videos and uploading them in order to send to recruiters. That was the goal, but my senior year while I was doing that, I was also realizing that I wanted to pursue theater as more than an extracurricular. They were both my two passions throughout high school and earlier. I like to think I made the right choice. But that YouTube channel is still there.”

ON SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS CAMP
“I really think there should be a SpongeBob camp. I think it’s a great idea. Certainly there would be aerobic training. There would be the classic singing while running, singing while on a trampoline, singing while doing splits. I actually think there would be contortion training, all of the things that I was trained on [for the role]: contortion, dance, the voice. And taking the voice and making it your own. I think at the end of the day, that is one of the biggest challenges. There will also be s’mores and campfire songs. Fun camp stuff.”

ON HIS FANS
“I love the fans. They’re awesome people. There’s people that tweet at me and the morning and say like, ‘I hope you’re having a good day.’ I’m not so great with Twitter and social media. I’m working on it. It’s hard. But I’ve got to say if you’re watching this, I see it. Sometimes I don’t wake up super happy, and it makes me happier. There’s so many wonderful people I get to meet at the stage door who come by time and time again. One of my favorite pieces of fan mail was a gift that I got. It was a jar filled with handwritten nice thoughts. Like some fact about ducks. It’s really sweet, and I still pull out random ones. They’re really special people with really thoughtful talents.”

ON HIS MEMORABLE TOTO PERFORMANCE IN THE WIZARD OF OZ
“It was something really special. I just wore like a black t-shirt and black shorts, and I think I had some facepaint on. It implied the DNA of a dog. My sister was Dorothy. As the legend goes, I had one responsibility—other than the occasional bark—which was to [spoiler alert] pull the curtain and reveal the Wizard. I guess I tripped or something. All I remember is that I pulled down the entire thing onto the Wizard himself. I think he was probably very kind about it, but he was an adult. It was a very big deal and very nerve-wracking."

ON LEARNING ABOUT LOSS AT AN EARLY AGE
“My mother passed away when I was seven. She had a piano in the house that she was teaching my sisters how to play. That was where I first encountered music, through her. She loved singing. She loved dancing. My father got remarried, and I have a wonderful stepmother and two stepbrothers, and so we have a bigger family that grew out of that tragedy. I look a lot like my mom. I’m the only one of my siblings with red hair, and she had bright red hair. I always have felt incredibly connected to her. I do feel like I’m a pretty optimistic, positive guy, but I also feel like I take things really seriously and like anyone else, I have bouts of doubt and sadness. I think I learned what that meant really young.”

ON PLAYING SPONGEBOB
“I feel a lot of ownership over every move I do in the show. It’s like this weird Slumdog Millionaire thing where you look at each little moment in the show, and I can go back to when I was six years old, and I was starting to take taekwondo. That was a big part of my life for 10 years. Then I do the splits in the show, and I go back to when I was a high school wrestler. I don’t want to be doing a role if I don’t feel like I have ownership over it in one way or another. I think the thing that’s really special about SpongeBob is that even though it feels irreplicable, that’s what they said about the cartoon. We figured out how to take this cartoon and create something new that is still identifiably the show but onstage, and that was all about taking ownership over it. I don’t think it’s an easy task, but I think that it’s the most rewarding approach.”