It sounds like some of the people working on Broadway’s Mean Girls needed to take a lesson from their own show. Reneé Rapp—who broke onto the scene in a big way by landing the role of Regina George when she was just 19—recently opened up about the hardships she endured while starring in the show.
While stepping into Regina’s hot pink heels mere months after winning a Jimmy Award for her high school theater work was certainly exciting for Rapp (she viewed the actors she got to work with “like they’re gods,” she said), life on the Great White Way was not always as rosy as one might imagine.
Rapp has been very open about her struggles with eating disorders in the past. In a recent interview with The Guardian, however, she shared that her condition was exacerbated during her time on Broadway by hateful comments from some (unnamed) members of the production who “would say some vile fucking things to me about my body.”
It got so bad, she says, that her parents actually flew to New York at one point to try to pull her out of the show. (The pandemic eventually did it for them.) While shifting her focus to music has been largely beneficial—Rapp just released her debut LP Snow Angel and also recently announced that she was leaving HBO’s Sex Lives Of College Girls—she says her parents worry more than ever, because “they know more now.”
“Eating disorders don’t just go away and like, you’re healed, like: ‘Sorry, I can eat again, ha ha!’ It’s a lifelong thing,” she continued. “I still struggle with it, but at least my parents know that I’ve been taken out of environments that were really harmful to my sickness, which is awesome and a huge win.”
Rapp is set to reprise her turn as North Shore High’s queen bee in big screen Broadway adaptation Mean Girls: The Musical, which will presumably resume production whenever the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes conclude. Hopefully, this experience is a little less “you can’t sit with us” and a lot more “cake made out of rainbows and smiles.”