It seems like just about every sapphic under a certain age is crushing on Mean Girls star Reneé Rapp, and now, she’s revealing that she herself had a crush on one of her Sex Lives of College Girls co-stars!
Rapp, who released her debut album last year and stars as Regina George in the new musical movie version of Mean Girls is on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter, where she opens up about the origins and meanings of a lot of the songs on her album, Snow Angel.
When she was asked about the song “I Do,” which the interviewer said “sounds like it’s about unrequited love,” she wasn’t shy about saying who she wrote the song about.
Rapp told THR she wrote the song about “My best friend Alyah [Chanelle Scott, who plays Whitney Chase on The Sex Lives of College Girls], and I don’t even think I’ve ever told her that I wrote it about her.”
“But I remember being like, ‘I love you so much, and this feels so romantic in a platonic way, but I don’t understand how to explain it,’” she continued. “And I now know that it was so much more complicated in my sexuality. And I was like, ‘Wait, you feel completely different to me than a boy does, and I love you. So am I in love with you?’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And I now know that she’s just my fucking rock, and I just don’t think I like boys.”
On Sex Lives, Rapp plays Leighton, a wealthy freshman whose parents have high expectations for her, and Scott plays Whitney, a star soccer player and the daughter of a U.S. Senator. The two girls, along with others played by Amrit Kaur and Pauline Chalamet, become roommates, and soon friends.
Like Rapp, Leighton is a lesbian, and in the interview, she talks about how playing the character helped her in her own coming out journey. She says that she’s glad that she can watch scenes in the show where her character comes out and think about how she was going through the same process in real life.
“I’m like, ‘Why am I freaking out all the time?’ I would go home and I would call my friends and I’d be like, ‘I think I’m a lesbian, but I really love my boyfriend. I would want to be with him, but I see him more as a friend,’” she recalled. “So not only was I doing that on the show, publicly, in a big way to so many people, and my family, who had no idea that I was gay, I was also going through it personally. It is fucking crazy to watch that back.”
Rapp will be returning for the third season of Sex Lives, but not as a series regular, only appearing in a few episodes. The first two seasons are streaming on Max.