Reneé Rapp Is So Over It

She paused her Hollywood and Broadway careers to go pop. It’s working way too well

- Maggie Lange

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