“It is the coolest thing ever because I’ve only recently started referring to myself as a lesbian, and I’ve only recently been in a relationship where I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m a lesbian for sure,’” Reneé Rapp told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published Wednesday. The Sex Lives of College Girls actor and singer describes watching footage on TikTok of scenes from the show’s first season, in which her fan-favorite character Leighton Murray comes out as a lesbian. The scene, she found, shared parallels with her lived reality.
“It is so interesting that at the time I wasn’t even aware that what I was experiencing in my own personal life was actually exactly what I was doing onscreen. I was in a relationship with a man, incredibly confused, unsure of myself, feeling so insecure in my acting. And I watched the scene the other day, and I was like, ‘Wow, I feel so lucky to have that,’” Rapp told THR.
The process, Rapp shares, was not without its complexities. “I think it made it a lot easier in ways that pissed me off but I’m also really grateful for. That [show] was the most parallel experience in my life, and I remember doing that specific coming-out scene and not acting at all. At all. I was just sobbing. I see that and I don’t see a character. I’m like, “That’s me,” she said.
The re-affirmation comes after an SNL hosting performance earlier this year, in which the actor was described by fans and press as “hard-launching” her lesbian identity, an evolution from how she’d previously identified publicly, as bisexual.
It’s not the first time that Rapp described exploring expressions of sexual identity through character interpretations as an actor. Speaking about her turn as Regina George in the Mean Girls musical adaptation, Rapp told Them that “[Regina being a lesbian] was always my interpretation of it, still is my interpretation of it. It might not be other people’s, and I truly don’t care. It’s mine, and that’s how I feel.”
And her relationship with music is yet another venue to chronicle the journey through her realizations about her identity. At one point she self-described as the “bisexual Justin Bieber.” Now, she tells THR, “I realized, as I was getting older, I was like, ‘Oh, I think I just want to be him’...I’m a lesbian, but wow, do I love Justin Bieber.”
Two weeks ago the singer posted a video to YouTube lip syncing over her hit song “Tummy Hurts” in which lyrics describe aching over a lost lover, with the caption “writing this then coming out as a lesbian i contain multitudes.”
Related: Reneé Rapp Says “People Are Clinically Obsessed” With Her Body
