Ethan Slater makes rare comment about 3-year-old son with ex Lilly Jay
Bad star Ethan Slater prefers to keep his family life under the radar.
“I try not to tell stories about my son because I want to let him meet the world and let the world meet him on his own terms,” Slater, 33, said on a recent episode of Gianmarco Soresi‘The disadvantage’ podcast. “So I don’t tell stories or anecdotes [about him].”
Slater welcomed his son, whose name has not been shared publicly, with his ex-wife Dr. Lilly Jay in August 2022. The current exes, who were high school sweethearts, broke up the following year while he was filming the movie. Bad films in London alongside Slater’s girlfriend, Ariana Grande. (Grande, who was married to Dalton Gomez before production began, and Slater denied any overlap in relationships at the time.)
Slater and Jay settled their divorce in September 2024 and now co-parent their son.
“[Being a dad] is the best in the world,” Slater said GQ in a 2024 profile, which briefly discussed their co-parenting arrangement. “It’s been interesting to navigate being a new parent. There’s nothing I want to do more than just show you pictures and talk about him because he’s the best and the light of my life.”
Although Slater has largely kept his family memories to himself, he briefly opened up to 37-year-old Soresi about celebrating Hanukkah with his only child.
“That moment when we lit candles with him and talked about what it means to be Jewish was a very interesting experience,” he said on “The Downside” late last month. “I’m grateful for that in a sea of not being grateful for a lot of other things. I’ve found some hope in that.”
Slater practices Judaism and calls himself a “regressive Jewish person in the world.”
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“It’s been a very strange time to be, I would say, a regressive Jewish person in the world. It’s been a very difficult time with the conflation of state ideologies with your religion, which I think are very different things,” the Tony Award nominee explained, broaching the subject of anti-Semitism. “They’re getting merged in every way possible, and I think that’s really disastrous.”
He continued: “There have been many different types of tragedies, like the shooting in Sydney, Australia, and in recent years the terrible atrocities that have been committed so often in our name. It’s been very crazy to have all these things happening at once, and it’s becoming difficult.”
The stars are lit this Hanukkah. “Before we light the candles, we all meditate on, ‘What is a miracle that I could create for someone else?’” Ashton Kutcher, who does not identify as Jewish, told Noa Tishby in a Dec. 15 interview about celebrating Hanukkah with wife Mila Kunis and their two children. “That, […]
Amid the deadly shootings of the Jewish population and the state of Israel’s wartime actions, Slater has leaned on his inner circle to help understand his personal identity.
“It’s hard to figure out how to move forward,” he said. “I think the small communities and contact with family and loved ones have been a very useful path for me to find out what it means to be Jewish and also politically distant in the world.”
Slater added, “There are many American Jews who try to distinguish between what we were taught in Jewish schools [and] through our synagogues that felt inseparable as children because we were so young. … There is a generation that is working very hard on that.”
