Reneé Rapp Is So Over It

Reneé Rapp Is So Over It,23-year-old singer and actor Reneé Rapp discusses her early exit from the HBO series ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls,’ her debut album ‘Snow Angel,’ out August 18, playing mean girls, and coming out to her family as bisexual.

Reneé Rapp Is So Over It

Photo: Molly Matalon It’s a hazy early-June day in Santa Monica, and Reneé Rapp is drinking a muddy purple smoothie — the strawberry probiotic from the notoriously healthful, exorbitantly priced grocer Erewhon. The 23-year-old actress and singer moved from New York to Los Angeles in 2021 to film the Max series she is now preparing to exit early. This is where her “white woman shines,” she says. “Not the real, amazing, beautiful, culturally dense Los Angeles. I mean Erewhon. I work solely so I can go to Erewhon.”

This is the blasé take-it-or-leave-it attitude that has become Rapp’s signature in her two short years in Hollywood. Her permanently skeptical eyebrows are often deployed to withering heights as a performer, attracting praise and pockets of fandom in every medium she has tried. Someone who can barely deign to be there? That’s glossy apex predator Regina George of Broadway’s Mean Girls, whom Rapp played as disdainful, bored, bossy, and drowning in her own confidence. That’s absolutely Leighton Murray, the deliciously caustic, closeted fan-favorite rich girl in Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s The Sex Lives of College Girls (Rapp’s first TV role). That’s the no-filter pop singer on the verge of releasing her first album. And that’s Rapp on TikTok, where she posts things like a video with a redacted list of the “grudges I hold and why” to her 1.4 million followers.

We’re on a discreet hotel patio yards from the beach. Rapp is wearing thick black liner around her chlorine-blue eyes, hard-femme chains, and an oversize ensemble of a black leather jacket and red flannel over a black shirt (Rapp recently stitched a fan’s TikTok that described her style as definitively bisexual). Her long metallic-silver nails have slightly knifelike edges. “I feel like I could walk into anybody’s closet and make my style,” Rapp says, looking out at the ocean. Her vocal tone is keyed to irony. “I come from that brand of white mom who’s like, ‘You can be God if you want it,’” she says. “I just have always known who I am.”

Photo: Molly Matalon

She signed with Interscope Records in June 2022 and put out her first EP, Everything to Everyone, in November, anchored by “Too Well,” a plucky, pissy song about resentment. It quickly found an audience on TikTok, where people who had already latched on to her content and SLOCG clips eagerly received her music as well. She has a nascent fandom on the platform, self-described as “Young Ex-Wives” in reference to a line from Rapp’s song “Colorado”: “Might even feel compelled to sing karaoke down at the local pe / And meet some young ex-wife / We’d start a brand-new life and never be lonely.”

Her debut album, Snow Angel, is out August 18; the new songs are emotive and confessional and about the perils of being emotive and confessional. On opener “Talk Too Much,” Rapp sings, “I wonder if we should just sit here in silence / ’Cause I think I talk too much.” She has a lush voice capable of both cool distance and room-thudding balladry, and she has taken the mechanistic mastery from Broadway and managed to retain her particularities (a laughing warble and a skyscraping roar). Listening to her music feels like peeking behind the posture of self-assurance. Her songs are passionate about the everyday tumult of crushing hard.

If some of Snow Angel’s tracks sound like conversations with exes, it’s because they explicitly are. There’s even some recorded dialogue in “Talk Too Much” that is, Rapp says, “from a conversation with a girl I was dating and I had a dream that I killed them. And I was like, Well, I can’t just think this thought on my own for the rest of the day, so I have to tell them, like, ‘I had a dream that I, like, murdered you. And does that mean something? Like, maybe that means we shouldn’t be together?’” It’s a funny moment on the track — the sort of cheeky quality that often breaks the tension in her music.

Now that Rapp’s doing what she loves, she says she cares less about how all of her other work is perceived. She places her tattooed limbs emphatically on the table. (Her childhood nickname, LITTLE GIRL, is inked in her dad’s handwriting on her right hand, and PLUS DE VOIX, French for “more vocals,” is on her left wrist.) “It’s not that I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t even give a fuck how I acted in that fucking episode of that show or that movie or whatever. It’s going to be what it will fucking be. Like when Mean Girls comes out, it will be what it fucking is.” The only fucks she gives now are about her music. “Those are the fucks that I love,” she says.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 31, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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