“I want to be an EGOT one day. Whatever serves that, is what I will happily do,” says Reneé Rapp, with all the alpha energy of her most famous characters. After receiving raves for playing Regina George in Mean Girls on Broadway and co-starring in HBO Max’s hit The Sex Lives of College Girls, she released her debut EP Everything to Everyone in November and is ready to be seen as a musician.
Less than a year after winning the 2018 Jimmy Awards, the highest high school musical honor, Rapp, 23, was cast in Mean Girls. When the show shuttered amidst the pandemic, she auditioned for the Mindy Kaling-co-created Sex Lives and quickly landed the part. It played out fortuitously, giving her the out that she didn’t realize that she needed. “Mentally, I wasn’t doing great in Mean Girls. I was really sick. I was struggling really badly with an eating disorder and just really unhappy. As much as I was making it seem like the time of my life, and it was in so many ways, I really needed a second,” she says. In a way that she never could have predicted, the show’s COVID-induced closure fast-tracked her career. “I was able to move into music quicker and move to L.A. quicker and move into TV quicker. It became 10 times the speed.” Her plan was working, and it validated her instincts.
Rapp’s Sex Lives character Leighton, a confident and outspoken wealthy native New Yorker struggling to come out, was an instant favorite when the show debuted in 2021. When Rapp first found herself on the set of what she knew would be a very high-profile show, she did what she best knew how to—be herself. “Crafting and creating Leighton sort of just became this big thing where I didn’t know how else to approach that character other than just absolutely being myself. I think so much of her is me. So many of her mannerisms and the way she thinks and talks and her cadence are really similar to mine. That’s honestly just because most of the time I just don’t know what I’m fucking doing, so I’m like, well I’ll just go with this,” she says.
It isn’t exactly that acting was a means to an end for Rapp, but she saw it as the best avenue to getting the industry attention she needed to break into music. Acting, though she enjoys it, was never going to be the main event. “[Music] is completely different in every way because it’s my own thing. It feels like me, it doesn’t feel like something I’m doing through someone else’s lens or through a different character’s idea,” she says. “Which is very nice because I’m not as crazy about that medium. I much more like doing my own thing than telling somebody else’s story, which is why I think I’m more a musician than an actor.”
She approaches her work with an intense drive and is upfront about her effort, not disguising the ambition that has powered her since her North Carolina childhood. “My entire career and life and every fucking of moment of wake that I have is all surrounding how is this going to benefit my music and fulfill the one dream that I have of being a pop star. I’m like, how does this all make this work? From the things I do when I wake up to the things that I do when I go to sleep,” she says.
TikTok has allowed Rapp, who is bisexual and plays a queer character on Sex Lives, to find a devoted audience, beloved by followers who look to her as a fellow theater kid and a voice for the queer Gen Z community. Soon, Rapp will reprise her Mean Girls character in an upcoming film version of the musical, introducing her to a much wider audience. But don’t expect increased attention to cause Rapp to lose the scrappiness that her fans love. She has a lot of feelings about who it is that holds the power in the entertainment industry and no concerns about sharing them.
She wants to talk about what she calls the “rough stuff” in an industry that is not as inclusive as it claims to be. “I think people are afforded so many more opportunities now, and I’m absolutely not in any way shitting on anyone who has knocked down some fucking bridge for me to be where I am today. [But] I think a lot of people are not what they say they are. So many people are like, ‘Oh, we’re creating these opportunities and these spaces.’ It’s actually just a ton of the same people sitting behind the same doors, saying different things because they know it looks better for them,” she says. “It’s really interesting to see, especially over the last two years, as it’s become more of a conversation in white spaces and in cis spaces, how everybody is so publicly supportive yet talks so much shit in private. I just am always blown away by that.”
Rapp has compared notes with friends on other TV shows. They’ve all seen the same things. “We’ve sat down at a table and had conversations about how people are treated, how [treatment can be different from] actor to actor, how they treat people on sets. The shit you hear is crazy,” she says. “I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard from friends that they’re like, this white man or white woman is writing my plot line—and this is a person of color. Or they’re like, well this straight person is writing my queer story.”
Rapp has an uncanny ability to harness her pain, rage, and upset to propel her forward. After an awful breakup in 2021—“I was essentially abandoned emotionally by someone I thought was my best friend,” she says—her first call was to her manager. “The second we got off the phone, i.e. we broke up, I called my manager and was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be the best year of my life,’ and he was like, ‘Are you good?’ I was like, ‘No, but this going to be the greatest year of my life.’ It just all made sense. All of a sudden, I didn’t have anybody who was trying to make me feel smaller so that they felt better and I was able to chase literally everything I’ve ever talked about.” There has been tremendous freedom in that. “In a lot of my life and a lot of my relationships in the past, I’ve [dealt with] this annoying, misogynistic competitiveness from other men that I’ve been with. I currently don’t have to deal with that, which makes my life so much fucking easier. If I could help out younger Reneé and be like, ‘Please leave these boys that think that your success is a threat to them,’ I absolutely would. It was a nauseating, nauseating five years to go through,” she says.
Finding her way artistically has allowed Rapp to look back on her past, when she was mocked by friends and family who considered her too emotional, in a new light. “It’s fucking hilarious that people were laughing at me for crying but now I actually, physically have created a business off of how hard I cry. I now profit off of that business and also make a lot of people comfortable off of that business,” she says. “It’s a huge fuck you to everyone who used to make fun of my emotional vulnerability. And I’m a grudge holder, so I don’t let that go.”
Hair by Vernon François for Redken; makeup by Karo Kangas for Westman Atelier; produced by Rhianna Rule.
A version of this story appears in the May 2023 issue of ELLE.
