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Jennette McCurdy Absolutely Can’t Stand Ariana Grande

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Jennette McCurdy still isn’t over her Nickelodeon days with Ariana Grande — and she says so on her own podcast.

Long before Ariana Grande topped the Billboard charts, she and Jennette McCurdy shared a soundstage on “Sam & Cat,” the 2013 Nickelodeon crossover that paired McCurdy’s “iCarly” character with Grande’s “Victorious” breakout. The show lasted a single 35-episode season before it was abruptly canceled in 2014 amid tabloid chatter about backstage unrest and pay disputes. Years later, McCurdy revisited that period on her podcast “Empty Inside,” and made it clear the wounds never fully closed.

• “Sam & Cat” ran for just one 35-episode season (2013–2014) before Nickelodeon canceled it amid reports of backstage unrest and salary disputes.
• In March 2014, McCurdy skipped the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, saying she’d taken a stand against “unfair network politics” — a claim Grande publicly disputed by denying she was paid more than McCurdy.
• On her 2020-launched podcast “Empty Inside,” McCurdy confirmed she’d retired from acting, citing emotional scars from childhood stardom and her time on unfulfilling TV roles.

A Partnership Built on Uneven Ground

Nickelodeon greenlit “Sam & Cat” as a can’t-miss pairing of two established young stars, banking on McCurdy’s “iCarly” fan base and Grande’s rapidly rising profile from “Victorious.” But as Grande’s music career exploded with radio hits, network executives began accommodating her schedule for award-show performances and outside projects, according to reporting cited by The Independent. That left McCurdy filming scenes opposite stand-ins and absorbing heavier production demands while her co-star’s pop career took off around her.

The imbalance wasn’t just a scheduling headache — it became the emotional core of the fallout. McCurdy has framed those years as a period where her contributions were treated as secondary to Grande’s ascent, a dynamic she says fed directly into her decision to walk away from acting altogether.

The Kids’ Choice Awards Boycott

Tensions boiled over publicly in March 2014, when McCurdy skipped the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards entirely. She posted at the time that her absence was a stand against what she called unfair network politics — not, as tabloids speculated, a petty spat with her co-star. Grande responded with her own public defense, denying that she was being paid substantially more than McCurdy for the same show.

I absolutely can’t stand her.

Production on “Sam & Cat” was suspended not long after the boycott, and the series was canceled outright that summer. The show’s quiet death matched the quiet unraveling of McCurdy and Grande’s on-set relationship — no big public blowup, just a slow accumulation of slights that neither side seemed interested in patching up.

McCurdy’s Retirement and Lingering Resentment

McCurdy launched “Empty Inside” in 2020, and it became the venue where she finally connected the dots for listeners. She confirmed on the podcast that she had retired from acting, describing lasting emotional scars tied to growing up as a child star and to television roles she found creatively hollow. Her comments about Grande — that she “absolutely can’t stand” her former co-star — fit into that larger reckoning with an industry she says chewed her up during her most formative years.

It’s the kind of falling-out that plays differently than the usual Hollywood cast beef, the sort chronicled in pieces like celebs who started out friends and ended up enemies. McCurdy isn’t lobbing insults for headlines — she’s describing a specific, years-long grievance rooted in unequal treatment on a specific set, which is a different animal than the petty spats that fill entertainment blogs.

A Pattern Familiar to Child Stars

What happened on “Sam & Cat” also tracks with a broader pattern Nicki Swift and other outlets have chronicled among young co-stars pushed into uneven spotlight — one actor’s career accelerating while the other absorbs the production fallout. It’s a dynamic that shows up across the industry, echoed in coverage of reality stars who treat their co-stars like trash, where perceived favoritism on set curdles into resentment long after cameras stop rolling.

Grande, for her part, has never used her platform to relitigate the “Sam & Cat” fallout publicly beyond her 2014 pay denial. McCurdy has kept talking about it on her own terms, on her own podcast, on her own schedule — which is really the whole story in miniature: one former co-star moved on to arena tours and Grammy stages, the other picked up a microphone and said exactly how she felt.