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In the summer of 2023, Reneé Rapp had a pretty good thing going. Her role as quiet-luxury-clad, newly out lesbian undergrad Leighton Murray on the HBO series The Sex Lives of College Girls had quickly turned her into a fan favorite, and she was just about to start filming her starring role as Regina George in the upcoming musical adaptation of Mean Girls. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that when Rapp announced in August that she would not be returning to season three of the HBO show and would instead pursue her musical career, it set the internet ever-so-slightly ablaze. Women in general, and particularly young women chasing fame, aren’t supposed to step out of the boxes in which they’ve been placed, but Rapp has never been interested in being packaged for maximum public consumption. (She did love Barbie, though, telling me: “I’m a big Greta Gerwig fan, and I’m obviously biased toward women.”)
Over the past six months, Rapp has finished filming the Mean Girls musical in New Jersey and embarked on a world tour in support of her second album, Snow Angel, which she released in 2023. But all the performance and pressure don’t seem to have made a dent in Rapp’s essential self, to the extent that an essential self is something that a journalist and fan can ferret out. (Yes, I’m a proud 30-year-old Rapp stan, or Young Ex-Wife, as some of her fans call themselves, taking the moniker from the lyrics to her song “Colorado”: “Might even feel compelled / To sing karaoke down at the local dive / And meet some young ex-wife, we’d start a brand new life and never be lonely.”) Plenty of celebrities use their onscreen fame to fuel musical vanity projects once the TV residuals kick in, but Rapp’s story flips the script; she’s wanted to be a singer since she was a small child, and she’s unabashed about admitting that TV and film are for her a means to access the musician’s life she’s always wanted.
When Rapp and I sit down in the lounge at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City to order iced oat lattes (mutual lactose intolerance), she’s tired from a predawn Today appearance earlier that morning, and she doesn’t seem interested in wallpapering a layer of good cheer over her exhaustion. “I really love routine,” she tells me, pulling her hood up and letting her signature raspy voice emerge from the cocoon of her sweatshirt. “I’m very used to musical performance, but it’s just a different use of energy than film and TV. My body can’t recover as easily from that stuff.”
Instant, mandated recovery was, at one point, what pop stardom was all about, especially for young female stars; just picture Britney Spears sweating her way through hundreds of shows during her Vegas residency or Jessica Simpson signing endless albums in malls across America. Rapp, however, is trying to actively make room for rest right now. She sings the praises of Bojangles—her favorite thing to eat in her home state of North Carolina, where she was raised alongside her younger brother, Charles (whom she says she “trusts more than anyone else on the planet” and briefly shares the screen with in Mean Girls). Rapp likes to have the Real Housewives of Potomac on when she needs to tune out: “I get very bothered when people are inconsistent—like, if you don’t like somebody, just don’t like them.”
Rapp shares this inability to suffer fools with Regina George, a role she took over from 2019 until COVID closures shut down Broadway in the spring of 2020. In Rapp’s hands, Regina is clearly ten times smarter than any of the worshipful peons who surround her in the school cafeteria, and her bored yet flirtatious energy in the onscreen musical makes a powerful case for Regina George actually being at least a little bit queer. (As Rapp wrote on Instagram in December: “regina george was a lesbian.”) Rapp’s vibe in person, though, is warm and ironic, a far cry from queen bee Regina’s ice-cold hauteur. “When I did the Broadway version of Mean Girls, I was obviously stepping into someone else’s shoes, so it’s been really fun to take some liberties and do my own thing,” Rapp says. She first took on the role of Regina shortly after arriving in New York from the North Carolina regional-theater circuit at 19: “You know, I’d never had a job before.”
Rapp is as down to make fun of herself as the next internet-raised 24-year-old, but she’s not going to be the butt of your joke or apologize for her presence in every room she enters. She’s always been this way, more or less. (At the 2018 Jimmy Awards celebrating high school musical theatre, actor Laura Benanti said of Rapp onstage, “I will never be as confident as that 18-year-old.”) And her preternatural poise was a big part of what endeared her to Tina Fey when she was first casting the Mean Girls stage musical and ensuing film. “When Lorne [Michaels] and I had our first meeting with Reneé about joining the Broadway cast, I felt like she was the smartest person on her team, even though she was only 19,” Fey says. “Reneé’s Regina terrifies you, but also you want her to like you.”
A capital-P popular girl might primarily be concerned with getting people to like her, but that preoccupation is one that Rapp is committed to leaving behind in 2024. She sees the expectations of perfection so routinely placed on women in the public eye, but she doesn’t consider it her job to bend to them. “Personally, I’m trying to care less. This is just my nature. I’m quite harsh but also quite sweet at times,” she says. Recently, she tells me, a strange man told her to smile: “It’s like, why are you demanding literally anything from me?”
Sometimes the demands placed on Rapp are closer to home. When we talk about the pressure on LGBTQ+ celebrities to perfectly represent their respective identities, Rapp says she’s grateful for her fans’ attention, which often manifests itself in flurries of social media odes to her lack of media training. (One might call this just a willingness to say almost anything on camera.) “The only times I don’t appreciate it are when I feel like people need something from me, specifically, in my personal life,” Rapp says. “I do get how exciting it is to have someone you like—or hate or feel any type of way about—be queer in the public eye, but I’ve had people say some crazy shit. I’ve had comments saying, like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re never going to stop coming out already,’ and in a way, I did sign up for this, but I also think I’m entitled to a little bit of anonymity.”
When I ask Rapp who she thinks is succeeding at playing “the game”—the fame game, the Hollywood game, the existing-in-public-as-a-human-being game–she lights up. “Beyoncé and Frank Ocean come across to me like that. SZA too. Billie Eilish. I also really like how Jennifer Lawrence handles herself.” Rapp shares some of Lawrence’s say-whatever charm, and fusing that bluntness with her major voice—which is reminiscent of SZA, Olivia Rodrigo, and even early Liz Phair—is a big part of what’s helped her achieve bona fide pop stardom over the past few years.
Rapp is currently gearing up for the Mean Girls release in New York, but she’s become deeply attached to her life in LA, telling me: “I’ve never had so many gay girlfriends in my life. Like, my entire group is lesbians, nonbinary, and trans people, and it feels really, really nice.” We marvel over the sheer number of options available to us as queer people in Los Angeles: the Sapphic wine bars! The LGBTQ+ line-dancing nights! “I really want to open a queer bar in LA,” Rapp confesses, saying, “I’ve found so much comfort in queer spaces over the last few years that that’s a real goal of mine.”
Rapp’s focus on prioritizing real-life community over Hollywood artifice also extends to her musical life; she’s best friends with her former Sex Lives of College Girls costar Alyah Chanelle Scott, whom she tapped to direct the video for her song “Snow Angel.” Rapp has also become close with Cara Delevingne ever since the model, actor, and reigning celesbian directed the music video for another one of her songs, the queer party-girl anthem “Pretty Girls.” When I ask about her recent collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, she visibly brims with joy. “Megan has been through so much shit, and she’s been done so dirty, and I am her biggest cheerleader and supporter,” Rapp says. “I will fight to the death for that woman.”
As we near the end of our interview, Rapp tells me about her next immediate project, which just so happens to be appearing as Saturday Night Live’s featured musical guest on January 20. Busy Philipps—who plays Rapp’s desperately wannabe-hip mom in the Mean Girls musical and has become Rapp’s good friend, referring to her as “my third child”—calls Rapp a “legitimate star,” a description that her upcoming SNL performance is likely to confirm for a worldwide audience. Don’t expect fame to change her much, though. As we depart, she saunters off in her hoodie, ineffably cool, undeniably herself.
Photographer: Mayan Toledano
Fashion Editor: Michael Philouze
Producers: Alex Max and Lev Khayznikov
Hair: Taylor Fitzgerald
Makeup: Dana Boyer
Set Assistants: Sam Dole, Gili Benita, and Mike Brewer
Fashion Assistants: Peter Hallberg and Ela Erdogan
Tailor: Zunyda Watson
