.jpeg)
Renée Rapp wants you to know something: she really and truly doesn’t give a f**k.
It’s a statement she makes with a flourish multiple times as she chats animatedly with GLAMOUR on a bleak November evening.
Almost a week has passed since her EP Everything To Everyone was released, and the singer-cum-actor-cum-Broadway star has an air of authenticity and self-assurance about her that is infectious.
Known as a triple threat or multi-hyphenate in the entertainment industry due to her performances across Netflix’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, New York’s Broadway as Regina George in the stage adaptation of Mean Girls and – most recently – her break out as a solo vocalist, Renée Rapp is going many places at once. Last week, her US tour for the EP sold out in less than two minutes.
Brash words and bravado aside, Renée concedes that the complicated thing is this – she actually cares a lot. “I very much want people to like me, to a fault,” she says. The huge lesson she’s learned, and now lives by, is that she has to put herself above all else.
She wrote the raw, introspective tracks on Everything To Everyone during an important time in her personal life that translates into her lyrics. “All of these songs come from a very specific era where I was no longer living in service to somebody else,” she says. “I’m no longer dumbing myself down to make my existence more palatable to others.”
Describing her battle against being “terrified of judgement” as an “ongoing process”, the songs on this EP symbolise her journey of “figuring out living for myself”.
This departure from people pleasing has been empowering for the 22-year-old singer. “I was in a lot of situations, relationships and friendships that were not serving me, and were sucking the life out of me,” she explains.
“I stopped people pleasing this year, and it showed me who should be in my life and who I shouldn't. On a work level and on a friendship level. On everything. I lost a lot of people in my life when I stopped trying to f*cking please everybody. And I am so grateful that those people are now gone.”
One person she shed from her life was clearly a big love, as it inspired her to write break up track In The Kitchen. While it cuts to the core grief of a romantic break up, Renée insists it was written as a means of fighting back against her own heartbreak.
“It was very hard to write in a very cathartic way,” she tells GLAMOUR. “I love a comeback. No matter how hard someone hits me upside the head, I am coming back ten times stronger. I’m so f*cking stubborn and competitive. So I got out of a relationship and I was like ‘mother f*cker, you think you’re gonna beat me?’”
Renée adds that writing a break up track has to be in service of herself, not anyone else. “I never want to write a break up song – or a song, period – that’s in service to another person. I don’t want to give anybody that power,” she says.
The Sex Life Of School Girls has returned to the US for a second season this month – with a UK release date TBC. In the much-loved teen drama Renée plays Leighton, a closeted lesbian who struggles to come to terms with her sexuality.
Looking back on playing Leighton in season one, Renée describes her experience as “scary as f*ck”. Things were complicated in her own life – she was in a relationship with a man, while grappling with her own bisexual identity.
“I was honestly very homophobic against myself,” she remembers. “I was so wrapped up and judging myself – I would never do that to somebody else.
She describes acting in season one as feeling like “coming out all over again”. But in comparison, performing in season two helped her to “embrace and embody my queerness”.
“No one is off limits – what a goddamn blessing,” she adds. “No one is doing it like the bisexual girl is. But I do still judge myself from time to time, which is f*cking weird.”
Renée is clear that these feelings link back to the patriarchy, and attitudes she has internalised from living within it. “We live in a society that caters to men, right?” she says with heartbreaking clarity – describing the subconscious instinct to view herself through the male gaze, one that many of us know all too well.
“Male validation is like crack to me, and I hate it. I can be out and want nothing to do with men at all. But I still want that validation.” Like so many of us, she knows that this impulse runs deep, but is confident she can shift it with time.
“I don't know what I need to do to reframe my mind,” she says. “I think it'll help as I get older.”
Renée is also completely aware of the darker recesses of her mind, and the importance of looking after it. “My mental health was weaponised against me when I was a kid,” she explains. “The conversation surrounding therapy, it was shameful. I was always the emotional one, and got made fun of for it. I was never emotionally stable – people called me a ticking time bomb.”
After being diagnosed with a mood disorder and advised on ways to manage it, she describes feeling empowered by understanding her own mind better.
“I have reclaimed [my mental health] in the sense that I sought out help,” she explains, admitting she was afraid of medication for a long time, but now takes it when she needs it. “I go to therapy, I’ve figured out what kind of workouts calm my mind, and I honestly value having lots of friends and people in my life," she says.
"You literally are who you surround yourself with, but it’s always an ongoing journey with mental health.”
As she navigates both Hollywood and the music industry, Renée is insistent on commending the people who have fought for her generation to occupy space. But she is quick to point out the continuing problems with representation.
“I think a lot of people preach ‘we want inclusive casting, we want diverse companies, we want queer artists, we want Black artists, yada yada yada,” she says. “It’s very much preached, but I don't think it's necessarily practiced.
“It's still the same white 60-year-old men or women that are controlling the entire thing. So let that not be lost, that we still live in that – you know what I mean?”
Really, Renée Rapp actually does give a f*ck. About all the most important things, including – above all – her own heart and inner peace.
