The success of Broadway actor-turned-musician Reneé Rapp is still something she’s grappling with. “I didn’t know that people even gave a fuck enough to listen,” she says quite frankly. To recap, the 23-year-old North Carolina native got her first big break at the age of 18 playing Regina George in the Mean Girls musical on Broadway. The musical shut down in early 2020 due to the pandemic—and never reopened (Rapp will be reprising her role in the movie Mean Girls: The Musical.) In late 2020, Rapp joined the cast of TV tycoon Mindy Kaling’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, where she currently plays Leighton Murray, a queer preppy student coming to terms with her sexuality. Rapp recently announced she was departing her series regular role, and will be guest starring in the show’s upcoming third season. While finding her footing in the acting world, Rapp started to share her original music on TikTok, and now has over one million followers. The virality of tracks from her debut EP, Everything to Everyone, rapidly put Rapp’s name into the mainstream.

Coming off the high of her sold-out shows as a musician, it seems as though Rapp has hit her second big break, even if Rapp is still grappling with her success. “Accessibility [to music] is so incredibly easy now that I [think the success] could just be a lie, but everything has been really amazing,” she says. Further cementing herself as a musical artist, Rapp is releasing her debut album, Snow Angel, out today. The 12-track album is an honest look at anxiety, insecurity, queerness and complicated relationships through Rapp’s personal lens. With previously released singles including the title track and “Talk Too Much,” Rapp unpacks the inner turmoil she places on herself. As Rapp continues to blossom in her career, in true Capricorn fashion, it’s clear there isn’t anything that she can’t do.

WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

“Being on stage just comes naturally and it’s what I always wanted to do. I used to watch artists perform on stages, and I would be so jealous. I [always] wanted to sing and perform. I never intended to act—and now I have, and it’s been amazing and such a cool opportunity. There’s like two sides to it. On one side, it’s so amazing, but on the other side, when you dream about something for so long and then you actually start to do it, you’re [almost confused.] I romanticize everything, and I’m such a daydreamer, so I feel like once I get to the point of actually doing something, I’m like, ‘well, now I did that—so how do to do it again?’”

CHARACTER REFERENCE

“Playing Leighton has helped me so much, and rocked my world in a lot of ways. At the time I started the show, I was publicly out [as queer], but I was in a heteronormative relationship. I was dealing with a bunch of [thoughts] in my own head about my sexuality, and also I would show up to set and somebody would be like, so are you really [queer]? [But] I love the role that I play, and how exciting it is. I like the community that is around the show, and I like people that really have a strong opinion on the character, whether they love her or hate her. I’m totally down with both.”

VULNERABILITY

“I have been very hard on myself in terms of being a good writer, because I feel so hard, and I want all of [my emotions] to be conveyed. I used to really worry about perception in terms of my songs and if people could tell who they were about. Now, even if they are about somebody else, I actually try super hard to never centre somebody else’s emotions in my songs, because I don’t write for people that have hurt me. I write in spite of them. If you’re gonna come into my life, and you’re gonna do something bad, you know what you’re signing up for.”

ONLY ONLINE

“Social media became a very big tool in my life when I started working on Mean Girls. I wanted to be very clear about who I was and [see] how I was perceived, because I was a teenager [in] the show. [But] I would always talk about music [online], as I was building my own platform—and it’s just become a really big part of my career. I got signed off of a TikTok that was doing really well.”

LEVELING UP

 “The last year in my life was [about] listening to a lot of people in the music industry, which was actually amazing, because I learned so much. But I’m very ready to make music that I feel like is genuinely a perfect explanation of me—and I don’t think that was my EP [but I hope that is Snow Angel.”

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