Ariana Grande Drops Out Of American Horror Story Season 13
The coven will be missing a witch.
American Horror Story is cooking up something extra wicked for its cursed 13th season. The anthology horror series fittingly announced its comeback on Halloween of 2025, revealing a truly attention-grabbing cast that immediately had superfans theorizing about the new story. Given the strong connection to Season 3’s Coven, it was widely assumed this season would bring the beloved witches back, and the first-look photos have confirmed it’s time for a Coven comeback.
FX picked up Season 13 at the start of 2020, but it’s taken a while to get the new story off the ground. American Horror Story: Delicate wrapped up the franchise’s twelfth season in early 2024, and then there was over a year and a half of silence about what was coming next. Creator Ryan Murphy finally delivered what the AHS fans had been waiting for on Oct. 31, 2025, posting the first details of the 13th season.
As the premiere approaches, a lot more info has been filled in, including an unfortunate cast change. Here are all the details.
Ariana Grande Was Almost Back In The Murphy-Verse
The AHS Season 13 casting announcement revealed a ton of returning favorites — and one AHS newcomer. Ariana Grande was set to fly into the franchise for the first time, after having previously worked on Murphy’s campy slasher series Scream Queens. But sadly, Deadline confirmed on July 10 that Grande had to drop out of the series before filming any scenes due to timing constraints.
The rest of the cast is like reading an AHS superfan’s ultimate wish list: Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Gabourey Sidibe, Leslie Grossman, and Jessica Lange.
The Casting Means Return To Coven
Once the cast was announced, fans were immediately convinced Season 13 would be strongly connected to Season 3. The only announced cast members that did not star in Coven (aside from Grande) are Lourd and Grossman — but their Apocalypse characters Mallory and Coco were revealed to be secret members of the coven in Season 8. As for Grande, she obviously has a very coven-friendly connection since she’s recently played the witch Glinda in Wicked.
Additionally, the casting video ended with Coven’s most iconic quote: “Surprise, b*tch. Bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.” Fans also recalled how Murphy previously promised the Coven witches would return in a future season back in 2018, after their first resurrections in Apocalypse.
Season 13’s Premiere Date Is Spookily Perfect
The new season will premiere on Sept. 24, which means there’s almost certainly a special Halloween episode that will drop midway through.
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