Reneé Rapp has grown a lot throughout the past year. As she just performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, delivering takes of her wildly talented vocals on “Snow Angel” and the energetic “Not My Fault,” Rapp’s audience gained a ton of new recruits.
For those who are just discovering the star, whether it’s through her music career or her reprised appearance as Regina George in the movie adaptation of the Mean Girls musical, there still is a lot to know about how Rapp got to where she is today.
Here’s what to know.
How Did Reneé Rapp Get Famous?
Rapp started her career in North Carolina, where she participated in high school theater productions. She won the Best Actress award at Charlotte’s Blumey Awards for a role in the school’s take on Big Fish. However, it was winning the Best Performance By An Actress at NYC’s Jimmy Awards and getting a $10,000 scholarship that kickstarted her career.
From there, she performed in other local plays like Spring Awakening and appeared at BroadwayCon’s 2019 Star To Be event — where she displayed her killer vocal range. In May of that year, Rapp announced that she would be playing Regina in the Mean Girls Broadway musical. This ran until March of 2020 when the pandemic led to the show’s permanent closure.
The star kept working, eventually being cast as Leighton in HBO Max’s The Sex Lives Of College Girls in October 2020. While she has since departed the show to focus on her music career, that has proven just as strong as a career path.
Rapp began touring in 2022, dropping her debut album Snow Angel in 2023, and then doing an international tour tied to that. Basically, she is very, very busy — but it is paying off.
On top of that, Rapp has been a delight in recent interviews, which has garnered so much attention that she joked about it on Saturday Night Live.