Reneé Rapp may be recognized from the Mean Girls musical or the HBO adolescent drama The Sex Lives Of College Girls, but she doesn’t care much about being an actress.
Her entire life, “from the moment I had a notion,” has been dedicated to pursuing music.
“There are films of me sitting at a coffee table in my parents’ home, making up songs and playing the harmonica before I could talk,” recalls the 23-year-old.
This was always the case. It had always been thus.”
The North Carolina native had written her first original song before the age of three.
“My mother is a germophobe, so I penned something for the foyer of our home,” she chortles, breaking into song. “If a person has a cold, you should not embrace or kiss them.”
Within a short time, she had established a strategy. Gain stage experience at talent shows, enroll in art school, win a scholarship at the High School Musical Theatre Awards, get seen by agents, work on Broadway, establish a reputation, and utilize it to launch a pop career.
Amazingly, everything worked.
Everything To Everyone, Rapp’s debut EP, is a low-key phenomenon. It was streamed 20 million times in December alone, due to its inclusion of sympathetic heartbreak songs and catchy pop melodies.
Her debut London performance sold out in two minutes. The facility had to be upgraded twice, and Rapp ended up performing for 2,300 fans, which was four times the original estimate.
A week ago, people lined up in the severe cold at five in the morning with homemade posters and bouquets.
Sixteen hours later, Rapp took the stage to the type of thunderous screaming normally reserved for boy bands and faulty roller coasters.
The concert serves as an extension of the singer’s online interaction with her fans. They exchange homemade gifts and inside jokes. And Rapp reveals intimate details about her romantic life while posing for BeReal images.
After spotting a banner that reads “Sing Baguettes or you’re racist and homophobic,” she even sings a few lines of the discarded song that has been leaked on TikTok.
After the performance, she is overcome with emotion, wiping away tears as the audience chants “strangers to lovers to foes” – the refrain of her hallmark song, In The Kitchen.
The tear-soaked lament is “the most meaningful song I’ve ever written,” according to Rapp.
It arrived exactly one year ago, while she was going through a breakup “that was incredibly personal and unpleasant on many different levels.”
One evening, Rapp was alone in her apartment, reflecting on all the meals she and her ex-partner had prepared there.
In the living room, sobbing.
“Otherwise, I could laugh at the scenario, but the kitchen hurts since I’m cooking alone, and food is such a love language,” she explains.
“But then I’d recall how I used to cook for [his] family. Who didn’t like me, and how I shrunk myself to make someone else feel at ease.
Therefore, I composed this song while crying alone in my living room.
The song writhes with misery like an open sore, but Rapp wasn’t merely expressing resentment toward her boyfriend.
“I had recently talked to members of my team who complained I wasn’t writing with enough personality,” she says.
“That truly angered me. As if to say, “You’re telling me that the one thing I hold to, my method of communication, you don’t feel it?”
“Therefore, not only was I angry over this breakup, but I was also extremely disappointed in everyone… And In the Kitchen evolved into such a skin-shedding. It was the most cathartic experience of my life.”
Equally essential to her is the exquisitely detailed What Can I Do, in which the bisexual Rapp describes falling in love with the girlfriend of the best friend of her boyfriend.
She called it her “first openly homosexual song” despite being out since she was 14 years old.
“Gayness was so oversexualized when I was a child, so I wanted my first homosexual song to be like a lullaby – gentle.”
In the South, homosexuality was often considered sinful.
Last year, she said on the Norwegian entertainment program Blkkbster, “There were websites called ‘Expose Pages’ where people would post stories about what girl had hooked up with whom, why it was disgusting, and why we should name her a whore.”
“This occurred to me frequently as a child, and it was quite distressing. I felt like a terrible person for a considerable amount of time.”
After Leighton came out at the end of season one, playing a queer character on The Sex Lives Of College Girls assisted her in coming to terms with her sexuality.
She says, “I was terrified of how it would be received.” “However, that is my proudest acting performance to date because I don’t believe I was acting.”
To her amazement, the scene altered the perspectives of others at home as well.
“Some of my family members are suddenly super-allies, while they weren’t when I was a child,” she explains.
“Like, it’s easier to accept my homosexuality now that I’m on a television program because it’s so glossy and romanticized.
“Is that ridiculous? Yeah.
“Will I approve it? Yeah.”
As you may have imagined, Rapp is somewhat transparent. She speaks in lengthy, continuous streams of consciousness that are both charmingly indiscreet and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
Her Broadway breakthrough, for example, is regarded as a long, painful struggle.
She chuckles, “I’m used to doing my own thing, so stage work annoys me to no end.” I lost consciousness for some time.
She also says she required the show’s makers to “pinky promise” to promote her music career before accepting the part.
That is a daring decision for any actress making her New York debut. Especially when Tina Fey, a comedic icon, and Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of Saturday Night Live, are the producers.
“I was so inexperienced and careless,” she groans.
“I suppose I’m a little delusional, and I’ll do whatever it takes to serve my life’s goal, which I believe is music.”
This year, Rapp will reprise her role as Regina George, this time in a film adaptation of the Mean Girls musical, while filming the third season of Sex Lives and completing her debut album.
How does she feel now that her aspirations have been realized?
“It means I wasn’t fake when I praised myself as a child,” she says.
