Reneé Rapp Is Ready for Her Pop Moment
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RENEÉ RAPP HASN’T BEEN sleeping well. The past six months have been a bit of a sleep-deprived haze for the singer and actress, full of weird or straight-up horrific dreams. Most of the time, she’s being booed off a stage. Once, she dreamed about murdering a person she had just started dating. The night before we talk, she had one so bad she doesn’t want to repeat it. “It was a really not-great thing to dream about,” she says.
Her subconscious isn’t the only thing that’s been keeping her up in recent months. Last year, with her career already gaining speed thanks to her starring role in Mindy Kaling’s hit Max comedy, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Rapp released her first EP as a musician, Everything to Everyone, and set out on a headlining tour in December. That winter, she started working on her full-length debut, due out this summer on Interscope. In January, she traveled to Europe for more shows. In March, she settled into New Jersey to film Mean Girls: The Musical — the movie adaptation of the Broadway show based on the 2004 film, in which she will star as Regina George. And when we speak in mid-May, she’s busy looking for a new home.
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“I feel like it’s September in my brain but it’s May in practice,” she says. She packed a lot into the two months she had in New Jersey; her album team, including producer and friend Alexander 23 as a key member, began spending time on the East Coast to help her finish the LP on weekends and late nights after filming.
“When someone is like, ‘Are you down to work every weekend?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, of course. You fucking kidding me?’” Rapp, 23, says. “Then I do a week of filming and I’m like a fucking zombie.”
That kind of pace is nothing new for her. After independently dropping a teaser of the song “Tattoos” last spring, Rapp quickly caught the attention of major labels. Interscope ended up signing her just two days before she had to begin filming the second season of College Girls; she went to write and record her first EP after spending 14-hour days on set. “Everything happens at fucking once,” she says now. “I overextended myself. But I’m glad I did. I’m not big into regrets.”
Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, Rapp knew early on that she wanted to go into show business. She was an outgoing kid — “the fearless version of who I am now,” she says — but a sensitive one, too, with big, easily hurt feelings.
After several years of dance lessons starting at age three, a friend’s mom encouraged Rapp’s mother to have her audition for a local production of Annie. Theater became something she mostly did during the summers. She remembers feeling isolated from the rest of the local theater community, and says that the same person who suggested she try out for Annie ended up “talking shit” about Rapp around Charlotte’s theater community.
“I feel like there’s a lot of shit to say about me,” Rapp says. “You can say I fucking am blunt, or very emotional, or whatever, yada, yada, yada. But they weren’t even saying that. They were just saying bullshit.”
Even when she felt ostracized, Rapp says, performing at summer-camp shows or local productions was a thrill. “I loved being onstage,” she says. “I also really loved being around all of these people who knew so much about this specific art form but wanted nothing to do with me. I was like, ‘Fuck, I want you guys to like me so bad.’”
In her teens, she refocused her attention on getting out of Charlotte. She tried joining a girl group that ended up going nowhere. After hearing about an alum of her high school who had won a Jimmy Award — a national musical-theater honor for teenagers — and gone straight from high school to Broadway, Rapp decided to channel her competitive nature into the same plan. She succeeded, taking home a Jimmy and getting cast at age 19 in the Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls by producers Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels.
It was a huge moment, but she still had her sights set on bigger things. “I told them, ‘I will only take this job if you promise to help me in my music career one day. I want to be a pop star. I do not want to do this forever,’” Rapp recalls. “They have been such a huge support system.”
Living in New York, Rapp felt overwhelmed. She made friends with the cast, but still felt disconnected, since they were all older and more settled in their lives. For the several months she played Regina George, she was also struggling with an eating disorder.
“It was because of things that were said and done to me on that show,” Rapp says, recalling hurtful comments from “someone who was really influential on that project and in my life at the time.” (She notes that it was not anyone who worked on the Mean Girls film.) “Getting told how he could tell I didn’t like my body … I was like, ‘I’m a fucking teenager,’” she says. She became so sick during this period that she would get pulled out in the middle of shows, feeling nauseous and faint because she wasn’t eating enough.
When Mean Girls shut down along with the rest of Broadway in March 2020, eventually closing for good, Rapp felt relief.
“There’s a picture of me on FaceTime with my ex, sobbing and being like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to eat in the middle of the day.’ I was scared shitless, and I was also happier than I had been in a very long time.”
She thought that in the time she wasn’t working, she could explore songwriting. The break didn’t last long: By that fall, she’d been cast as a lead in College Girls, as the preppy, closeted Leighton, and moved to L.A. to start filming.
Now, for the time being, Rapp’s attention is finally all focused on her pop ambition. (Season Three of College Girls is currently on pause due to the ongoing WGA strike.) She says her album, Snow Angel, is a snapshot of what she’s been going through lately, including her still processing the “intense” breakup that informed her 2022 EP.
Songs like her new single, the LP’s title track, which came together in a late-night punch-up session with Alexander 23, showcase the album’s unflinching emotional honesty. “It is the most intense interpersonal relationships and experiences that I’ve had over the last five months, whether they be good or bad,” she says. “And all of them are bad.”
In Alexander 23, she adds, she’s found a creative partner who balances her emotional self: “He’s someone who never cries, and I cry all the time.” A onetime hater of pop music, who started leaning more into the natural poppiness of her sound, Rapp feels like the new songs are a perfect amalgamation of the R&B and classic rock she grew up loving, thanks to her parents.
The other thing she’s noticed: The songs are really difficult for her to listen to, “which,” as she puts it, “means I know it’s good enough to put out.”
Production Credits
Produced by Joe Rodriguez. Hair by Marissa Marino for A-Frame. Makeup by Loren Canby for
A-Frame. Styling by Morgan Pinney for The Only Agency.
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