We all love melancholic songs with poetic lyrics that help us get through whatever pain we’re feeling. Add one of the best voices of the current pop scene to that and you have Reneé Rapp‘s songs. The 23-year-old actress and singer have made some noise in the industry in the past few years.
Reneé Rapp went to high school at the Northwest School of the Arts, a performing arts school in North Carolina. At 17, she attended the Jimmy Awards (The National High School Musical Theatre Awards), and won “Best Performance by an Actress”, with an extraordinary solo of the song “All Falls Down” from the musical Chaplin.
On the podcast “Growing Up Broadway”, Rapp says that after graduation and the Jimmy Awards, she had a year to get a job on Broadway, and if she couldn’t, she would then go to college. Well, we’re happy to say that the actress debuted that same year – the beginning of a pop star career. Let’s take a look!
Broadway life
Reneé Rapp made her Broadway debut in 2019 as Regina George in Mean Girls, a new musical that takes the name of the very famous movie from 2004 by Tina Fey. Regina, the queen bee of the school, is an extremely confident, sexy, and (obviously) mean girl, which was very challenging for Reneé to play.
Rapp joined a wonderful cast, full of other amazing actors, such as Erika Henningsen (Cady Heron), Barrett Wilbert Weed (Janis Ian), Ashley Park (Gretchen Wieners), and even Sabrina Carpenter, who later got the role of Cady.
Unfortunately, the show came to an end way before expected, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
FROM NY TO LA
After the Mean Girls closing, Reneé Rapp booked the role of Leighton Murray in the HBO original series The Sex Lives of College Girls, a teen comedy-drama by Mindy Kaling that follows a group of four girls starting college life and exploring the sexually active lifestyle.
Reneé had to move all the way across the country, from New York to Los Angeles for the shootings. She then gave life to Leighton, a rich sarcastic girl and a freshman at Essex College. During the first season, we start learning more about Leighton and her sexuality. We go through her journey as a closeted lesbian and the difficulties it brings to her relationship, all that while trying to hide part of her from her parents.
Rapp recently talked on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” about how hard it was to explore Leighton’s sexuality while she was struggling with her own. As a bisexual woman in a heteronormative relationship at the time, she claimed that she didn’t feel good enough to portray a queer character, and would have panic attacks doubting her sexuality.
“I wanted so badly to do a good job. […] I wanted to play the role in a way that if I saw it as a kid it would feel good to me. So I wanted to do a good job so bad that I was just so nervous all the time, so yeah, it was, like, so much [the first season]” said the actress regarding playing a lesbian girl.
The show already has two seasons and has recently been renewed for a third one.
Hitting the studios
In 2022, Rapp released her first EP, Everything To Everyone, with seven tracks. She dropped a few singles before the album that truly won the public and made the album a success.
In fact, Reneé was really smart when promoting her songs. The College Girls actress used TikTok to share her music before even dropping the album. She would make videos previewing them and also live streams showing her followers her process of songwriting. All of that helped the singer build a loyal public that would listen to and love her music.
At the end of the year, Rapp did seven shows in four different cities in the US. The tour was sold out, and people got to see her amazing performance on stage. A few weeks ago, she also dropped the deluxe version of the album, with two new tracks.
Reneé’s songs talk about all sorts of stuff, from heartbreak to anxiety, in a beautiful and poetic way. If you’re up to some good melodies and lyrics, you’re definitely going to like it.
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The article above was edited by Beatriz Oliveira.
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