Sex Lives of College Girls' Reneé Rapp Recalls "Terrible" Time While Filming Season 1
Welcome to Life Imitating Art: 101.
Reneé Rapp may play a force to be reckoned with as Leighton on Sex Lives of College Girls, but she's not always as confident behind the scenes. In fact, the actress recently got candid about her struggles while filming season one of Mindy Kaling's HBO Max series.
"The first year doing College Girls was terrible," Rapp admitted to host Alex Cooper on the Feb. 28 episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast. "It sucked so bad. At the time, I was in a heteronormative relationship and I hated going to work."
As the 23-year-old—who stars alongside Amrit Kaur, Alyah Chanelle Scott and Pauline Chalamet on the series—explained, part of the issue was dealing with major imposter syndrome.
"I was like, 'I don't think I'm good enough to be here," she continued. "I don't think I can be here. I don't think I can be doing this. Maybe I'm just trying too hard?' I would come home and I would psych myself out, literally."
Though Rapp identifies as a "cis white woman who is bisexual," that didn't stop her from questioning herself over playing a lesbian character.
"I will never forget, I sat on my front porch and called one of my friends and I was like, 'I am straight, I think I'm straight, I can't do this,'" Rapp recalled. "I was just in panic constantly. I wasn't [straight], but I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing at me—or me laughing at myself—that I hated the first year of filming."
And as the Mean Girls: The Musical alum noted, it was reminiscent of her own experience exploring her sexuality while growing up in North Carolina.
"Now I'm on a TV show and I'm very publicly out and accepted as a bisexual woman and on the show as a gay woman," Rapp shared. "I did not have that same support as a kid and so I resent it in a lot of ways."
Luckily, the "Colorado" singer's relationship with her parents is great nowadays.
She added, "It's still really, really hard because I never fully will believe that somebody who treated me like that as a kid is now really accepting of it. You just like it now because it's comfortable for you and it's something exciting that you can romanticize around my life."
Of course, Sex Lives has already aired a second season—with a third one on the way—since Rapp's initial hesitation, meaning she did stop beating herself up. Eventually.
"I wanted to play the role in a way that, if I saw it as a kid, it would feel good to me," she confessed. "I wanted to do a good job so bad that I was just so nervous all the time."
Study up on the first two seasons of Sex Live of College Girls on HBO Max before classes resume in season three later on in 2023.
Get the drama behind the scenes. Sign up for TV Scoop!