Tag: TikTok

I
’m looking for the black Range Rover with the glittery pink license-plate frame.

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the passenger pickup at LAX is packed and lawless. When the SUV pulls up, Addison Rae is behind the wheel in a striped pinafore with nothing underneath it but black tape in two giant X’s covering her nipples. 

It was Rae’s idea to pick me up from the airport, and her car is as chaotic and ultra-femme as her persona. There are Chanel lipsticks and full-size bottles of Ex Nihilo perfumes in the compartment beneath the touch screen. Her back seat has at least one tutu, a wig, an embellished bra she found on Etsy, and a copy of Vanity Fair’s October 1992 issue, featuring a naked Madonna hanging off a pink pool floatie on the cover. The VIP pass from Charli XCX’s Brat release party last summer still sits in her car door, and beaded necklaces made by the songwriters who helped on her upcoming debut album hang around the rearview mirror. 

“Welcome to my place,” Rae says, giggling, as I settle in. She turns down her personal playlist, which features songs by Madonna, Prince, Marilyn Monroe, and Kate Bush, as she smoothly navigates her way out of the airport and toward my hotel in Beverly Hills. She just moved to a new home nearby, but she’s not ready to show it off yet. It probably doesn’t look too dissimilar from her car; she says the only décor she has up yet  are bras hanging from the light fixtures and a framed picture of Judy Garland mounted on a wall.

It wasn’t long ago that Rae, 24, moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles solely off the success of her TikTok page. She became so famous on that app that she has 88.5 million followers and is still the fifth most-followed person on it, despite having largely stepped away. But TikTok celebrity was never the end goal. Since childhood, Rae has had superstar ambitions. She dreamed of acting, singing, or dancing her way to the stage or screen, by any means necessary. Now, Rae may finally be proving to the world — and herself — that those ambitions can be realities.

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“Timing is everything,” Rae tells me during our 48 hours together. Everything about Rae’s 2024 has definitely felt like perfect timing. That  February, her friend Charli XCX kicked off her Brat rollout by hosting a Boiler Room party in Brooklyn. There, Rae sang her and Charli’s song “2 Die 4,” from Rae’s 2023 EP, AR, to an ecstatic crowd of Gen Z club kids. It was her first public singing performance ever.

About a month later, Charli and Rae released their second song, a remix of Brat lead single “Von Dutch.” It was a cult classic in the making, with Rae doing her best Britney Spears before unleashing a high-pitched scream that immediately went viral. Charli’s sixth album ended up defining the summer of 2024, and Rae came along for the ride. 

Then, in August, Rae built upon the buzz with “Diet Pepsi,” the first single off her first album, due this year. The track — a dreamy, alt-pop song about being young and in love — has touches of Born to Die-era Lana Del Rey and a black-and-white video that references both the 1965 cult film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Bruce Conner’s Toni Basil-led experimental movie Breakaway. 

Everything about this new Rae was strange, campy, and, most important, fun. She’d been known as a family-friendly if cheeky influencer — whipping her hip-length hair, scrunching her button nose, and flashing those saucer-like brown eyes down the barrel of her iPhone as she pantomimed along to the lyrics of whatever song was trending at the time. Now, it was as if she’d taken a John Waters left turn, like a cheerleader who got lost in her high school’s art department. 

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She followed “Diet Pepsi” with the dazzling and hypnotic “Aquamarine.” She aligned herself with the music and fashion world’s most beloved avant-gardists — Charli, Arca, Rosalía, Petra Collins, Interview Magazine’s Mel Ottenberg and Dara Allen — who helped bring her vision to life everywhere from music videos to remixes to surprise performances at Madison Square Garden. 

“It’s been fun to watch her evolve,” Charli says. “Everything she does relates back to her art — every item of clothing she wears, everything she says in a red-carpet interview, everything she tweets — it all is a part of the world-building.”

The rise of Rae has come with almost as many questions as she has followers: How did the popular girl with an overflow of Southern charm get invited to the cool kids’ table? How did an influencer create such eclectic and critically acclaimed singles? Can she become the first person to translate TikTok fame into full-blown pop stardom? The truth is Rae has been doing her homework, studying her idols down to their smallest moves. And like her heroes — Madonna, Marilyn, Judy, Britney — she knows a big gamble can make for a bigger impact. 

Crossing over was “always the plan,” she says. A couple of years ago, she stepped back from posting frequently to give her dreams a real chance. “It was a risk, knowing that people don’t want to see somebody try something new.”

“ON THE BLOCKS! On the blocks!”

It’s been 12 hours since Rae dropped me off, and boot-camp instructor Pauly Solo is yelling into a headset over nightclub-decibel EDM remixes. Solo’s invite-only gym is packed this Monday morning. Pictures of Kobe Bryant, Bruce Lee, and Prince hang above huge dance-studio mirrors. Every stair-climber, treadmill, and mat is occupied by a glistening body, each person sweating and trying to catch their breath. 

Rae is among them, laser-focused and sprinting on a treadmill in the most pop-star-coded gym outfit possible: a black bralette, matching micro shorts, thick coral calf socks, and a pair of gray Hokas. Her recently bleached blond hair is in a loose ponytail. This is her second workout of the day; soon after dawn, she joined her friend Rosalía at Barry’s Bootcamp. Each day she’s been doing some type of workout: Pilates, dance, cardio (though not usually twice in one morning).

After class, Rae puts on an oversize denim button-down embroidered with Winnie the Pooh characters and grabs her pewter Prada handbag. Her New Orleans Saints cap is a bit too big, falling over her eyes. We hop back in the Range Rover and set out on her usual morning routine: Beverly Hills Juice followed by Blue Bottle, where she grabs an iced NOLA, her favorite, as a friendly barista gently ribs her for wearing a Saints cap in Rams territory. 

 This weekend roughly marks her fifth anniversary in L.A. Around Thanksgiving 2019, Rae dropped out of Louisiana State University, where she was studying broadcast journalism, hoping to someday cover sports. 

“I kind of thought that was my in to the entertainment industry, in a way that people wouldn’t look at me like, ‘Oh, please. You’re never going to be able to move to Hollywood,’” she explains. 

The previous summer, Rae had downloaded a new app called TikTok. The short-form video platform had merged with popular lip-synch app Musical.ly in 2018, absorbing its young stars and fan base. Around that time, however, it was still a mélange of memes trying to find its footing somewhere between the irreverence of Vine and the personality-­fueled labor of YouTube.

 For Rae, it was just another social media platform to try. She started making videos, often lip-synching to a song or some dialogue. One day, she posted a clip that, she says, got more than 50,000 likes: a sun-kissed Rae with long, beachy waves mouths along to a trending sound bite before a hand grabs her hair and pulls her offscreen. The gears that turn TikTok have always been opaque, but there was no question: The algorithm loved this cute girl with the cleft chin and the perpetual smile.

 Rae stayed on top of every trending audio clip, but it was the viral dances that got her the most attention; TikTok was in need of its own homegrown stars, and the kids-next-door like Rae and her peers were the perfect representatives for a new generation’s ­burgeoning identity. She watched her follower count steadily climb. Soon, brands were clamoring for her to promote their products, from obscure fast-fashion sites to American Eagle and L’Oréal.

“Even though it was still at such a small scale, I think I was like, ‘This is how I’m going to be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do,’” she says. 

College wasn’t really working out for Rae, anyway. Broadcast journalism wasn’t the fit she hoped it would be. (“All my prayers out to people who have to write papers on things that they don’t care about,” she says.) Plus, she had failed to make LSU’s Tiger Girls dance team, a lifelong dream for the girl who had been dancing competitively since she was six. “I had to really reassess my goals,” she says.

In October 2019, Rae broke 1 million followers on TikTok. She was starting to get recognized at football games and on campus, so with her family’s support, she left school and headed to Los Angeles with her mom. That December, Rae became a founding member of the Hype House, a now-defunct content-­creation collective. Alongside Dixie and Charli D’Amelio, Chase Hudson, and Thomas Petrou, she was part of a new Gen Z Brat Pack — everyone wanted to know who was dating or feuding or duetting who. Brands turned Rae and her peers into ambassadors of the new American dream, where anyone can become rich and famous with just their phone, good lighting, and the willingness to post as often as they can.

“I felt like I was dropped in the middle of The Truman Show,” Rae says. Her mom went back to Louisiana and left her 19-year-old to her own devices. “It was so different and weird and fun. I didn’t feel like I was curating anything. It felt very much like discovery.”

“I WAS LIKE, ‘TIKTOK IS HOW I’M GOING TO BE ABLE TO DO WHAT I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO.’ ” 

Those first few months in L.A. were as glamorous as Rae could have hoped; she went to New York and the Bahamas, premieres and parties. Paparazzi would wait outside the restaurants she would frequent. Everyone was young, hot, and hungry. But as Covid-19 began spreading, the chaos cooled down. Rae’s mom came back to L.A., this time with Rae’s dad and two younger brothers. The family found a more permanent home together.

Despite her success, it certainly wasn’t her goal to make a living on social media forever. A month before lockdown, she went to the Sunset Tower Hotel’s bar with talent managers Justin Greenberg and Joe Izzi.

“I want to act, and I want to sing, and I want to dance,” she told them. “I know I can if I just get the chance to prove myself.”

Izzi and Greenberg believed in her. That summer, they helped Rae land the lead role in Netflix’s He’s All That, a gender-swapped remake of the 1999 teen classic, where she would play an influencer who gives the dorky art student a makeover. (“I mean, who would know it better than myself?” she jokes.)

Her managers booked her first songwriting sessions, too. “As soon as I got the opportunity to start writing music and acting, I did,” she explains. “When I moved here, I was like, ‘OK, I have to start acting classes. I have to start singing. I have to start these things immediately, because I’m already so behind.’”

Rae dropped “Obsessed” in March 2021. Produced by Benny Blanco and co-written by Rae herself, “Obsessed” was a pretty standard dance-pop song: catchy and self-empowering with the tongue-in-cheek chorus “I’m obsessed with me-e-e as much as you.”

 “I still think that song’s good,” Rae says, smiling. “Obsessed” was, by almost all definitions, a flop. For all the songs she helped to make famous on TikTok, her own debut didn’t even crack the Hot 100. It was widely panned, with one critic writing that Rae should “stick to lip-synching.” On Twitter, viral posts reveled in her failure.

 “I think there’s room for constructive criticism,” she says, diplomatically. “[But] it almost wasn’t even about the song. It was [about] me doing it.” That same month, she faced backlash after she performed the TikTok dances of the day on Jimmy Fallon. Viewers pointed out that they had largely originated with BIPOC choreographers who got nothing for their creations. And while Rae wasn’t the first creator to appear on late night for a TikTok-dance segment, she became the focal point of the conversation. (Shortly after the controversy made headlines, Rae responded by saying that the original choreographers “deserve all the credit.”)

“MEETING CHARLI XCX WAS A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN MY LIFE. SHE’S BEEN A BIG SISTER AND MENTOR FOR ME.”

In August, when He’s All That debuted on Netflix, the reaction online was just as dismal. But Rae’s performance earned some minor props from critics, who saw her doing her best with a weak remake of a beloved film. And unlike “Obsessed,” He’s All That was a hit, becoming the top film on the streaming service the week it was released. (Soon after, Netflix would sign Rae to a multimillion-­dollar, multipicture deal; she’ll start filming her next project for them this year.)

Still, the reactions weighed on her. There was a flood of online hate; her place, according to the most vocal, was on TikTok, and any aspirations she had beyond that were a joke. 

 “I had to rethink everything,” she explains. “And I was like, ‘How am I going to get to a place where on my own, I feel like I can do this and feel confident in it, and fully deliver what I feel like is the best version of this?’”

Rae had built enough of a financial foundation through brand partnerships and the Netflix deal to step away from TikTok as much as she could, going from five posts a day to maybe one or none at all. Behind the scenes, she was looking for auditions and more writing sessions. It was time to get to work.

ONCE THE ICED NOLAs have been drained, Rae suggests we walk over to one of her favorite cafes, Joan’s on Third, for her post-workout meal of scrambled eggs and tuna salad. Sitting outside is a reminder how embedded she is in Beverly Hills. She waves down a woman who is another regular at Pauly Solo’s boot camps.

“I missed you at class today,” Rae says, Southern charm hard at work. Not long after, her best friend Lexee Smith — a dancer who has been serving as Rae’s creative consultant — walks in to grab lunch. Smith doesn’t live far from Rae, having just moved into a new spot. As they’re making plans to hang later, a group of girls boldly approaches our table. “We don’t want to interrupt, but we’re massive fans,” says one, still in her school uniform. “Our friend dressed as you for Halloween!”

A phone is whipped out to show Rae a pic of their group costume: Charli XCX and all of the featured artists on her Brat album remixes. There’s a Lorde and an Ariana Grande and, as promised, an Addison Rae. The teen who dressed as Rae shows off her interpretation: She glued a piece of paper that read “Diet Pepsi” to the back of her jeans, like the art for the single. Clearly thrilled, Rae gasps, then smiles wide for a selfie with them.

“[Meeting] Charli XCX was an obviously pivotal moment in my life,” Rae tells me. “She has been such a big sister and mentor for me.” After dropping “Obsessed,” Rae started taking more studio sessions with other writers and producers. Charli, who was recording 2022’s Crash at the time, was one of them. She remembers the “spark” she felt meeting Rae at a West Hollywood studio that day.

“She burst into the room in Ugg boots and hot pants after parking her pink Tesla in the driveway and exclaimed, ‘Boys are stupid!’ and then immediately was like, ‘Wait, we should write a song about that!’” Charli recalls. “I know that sounds simple and maybe silly to some people, but to me that was such a sign of instinct and fearlessness.” 

Charli listened to some of Rae’s other songs, like “2 Die 4,” which Charli loved. Even though Rae was starting to assemble a dream team of collaborators, her debut project was eventually shelved. She focused on auditions, booking a role in Eli Roth’s slasher film Thanksgiving, and starred in a Snapchat reality show titled Addison Rae Goes Home, where she headed back to Louisiana to reconnect with her roots. In 2022, however, an act of fate occurred by way of an invasion of privacy: Rough versions of a group of songs she’d recorded leaked online. 

“It felt so terrible,” she admits. She still doesn’t know how they were stolen. “I was really hurt.”

But something strange happened: Those rough demos began to go viral — and not just in an ephemeral TikTok kind of way. People began begging for Rae to release them. Charli was begging to be on them.

“Charli had texted me and was like, ‘I heard “2 Die 4” leaked. You know I love that song. Let me do a verse,’” Rae says.

Multiple critics called the songs “flawless,” while others compared her to Britney Spears. “I’m not super religious, but I am spiritual,” Rae says. “I think everything happened for a reason. Thank God the songs leaked.”

Even with the buzz, few record labels were clamoring to sign an influencer whose initial attempt at a music career flopped so spectacularly. “There were a lot of people that could not be less interested,” she admits. 

Her saving grace was Columbia Records CEO Ron Perry, whom she knew through her boyfriend, Grammy-nominated producer Omer Fedi. They set up a meeting.

“I walked in with a binder, and I made a slideshow,” Rae says. The presentation was full of pictures and word clouds that she felt represented who she would be as a performer. “I just mood-boarded my vibes. I literally had no music to play him at that point, so it was about trust. Like, ‘Yes, I’m in the clouds, and I enjoy being there. But I’m also serious.’”

Perry was impressed and ended up signing Rae in late 2023. Around then, Charli reached out again, this time about the “Von Dutch” remix.

 “‘You’re sitting in your dad’s basement while I’m chasing my dreams’ was just some silly note that I had written when I was on a plane,” Rae says, but she sent it to Charli, who encouraged her to put that in her verse.

“[Charli] respected me and my ideas,” Rae tells me. “It was the first time I really took the step on my own to be confident in the ideas I had and follow that. I owe that all to Charli.”

Rae started to do smaller sessions, usually just her and a producer, as a way of challenging herself to trust her instincts. She met songwriters Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, who are signed to Max Martin’s publishing company, MxM Music, and had been cutting their teeth working with Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift, respectively. They’re both around the same age as Rae and had been familiar with her; Kloser “knew everything about Hype House” and “absolutely stayed on top of all the drama during Covid,” Kloser says, though neither had any idea what Rae was looking to create musically. “We were both shocked [that] her taste leaned very left and underground at times,” Kloser adds. 

“I THINK GLAMOUR IS JUST EVERYTHING. I WANT TO BE PRIM AND POISED. MARILYN MONROE NEVER SAID ‘Y’ALL.’ ”

Rae met the two songwriters in L.A. that February, showing up to the studio in a pair of pink Pleaser pumps, leather pants, and a sequin belt. (“You look good, you feel good, you do good.”) The three women listened to music all day, but weren’t getting far with their ideas. As the session neared its end, they decided to try one more idea.

“Luka started playing the piano, and then literally, it was like magic,” Rae remembers. They began humming a melody that would end up becoming the chorus of “Diet Pepsi.”

Kloser, Anderfjärd, and Rae would go on to co-write every song on Rae’s album, working between L.A., New York, and Sweden. When they were at the MxM offices, Martin himself would sometimes say hi. As a pop devotee, and a Britney Spears megafan, Rae was awestruck when he offered her some advice.

“I had told him I struggle with talking about things that are really close to me,” she recalls. “He’s like, ‘The only way you’re going to really push yourself [is] to say things that are true and real. Once you spill it out, you can always take it down, but if you start shallow, it’s hard to bump it up.’”

Rae teased her new music with a cryptic post in June, sharing a clip of herself in a bikini and stilettos walking underwater in a pool as a snippet of the not-yet-released “Aquamarine” played over it. But Rae always knew “Diet Pepsi” would be the real reintroduction, and her gut instinct was right: She made her Hot 100 debut.

Her follow-up single, “Aquamarine,” was the third song the trio wrote, penned during a stay in Sweden at MxM’s headquarters. ​“The word is so beautiful and the color is so gorgeous that I was like, ‘How can I make a song that contextualizes that feeling?’” says Rae. The result was a Nineties-style deep-house track about transformation and rebirth that squashed any worries that Rae couldn’t follow up “Diet Pepsi.” Her heroes were starting to take notice: Ariana Grande was effusive when the two met, while Lady Gaga used “Aquamarine” in a TikTok video. She even got a major co-sign from the avant-pop producer Arca (Ye’s Yeezus, Björk’s Vulnicura), who released a remix called “Arcamarine.”

As we drive around, Rae plays me more tracks from the album. What she shares are hypnotic, trance-like pop songs, pulsating and lush, which will no doubt accomplish the primary goal of Rae and her collaborators: to make people dance. The lyrics are threaded with images of a life that’s young, fun, and free: being naked on a beach, flying to Paris on a whim, being drunk at a bar. There’s no ego or self-seriousness; as we hear her exclaim “I’m the richest girl in the world!” toward the end of one track, she laughs at herself with her whole body from behind the wheel. 

An upcoming single, “High Fashion,” dives into the world of couture and is as quotable and contagious as her previous two. Over a Range Rover-vibrating bass, she offers up the cheeky chorus “I don’t need your drugs/I’d rather get high fashion.” After Rae wrote that line, she built a collage “of shoes and glamorous things and Marilyn Monroe.” In fact, almost every song would begin with Rae sharing a mood board with Kloser and Anderfjärd.

 “With Addison, it can come down to a rock she saw,” Kloser adds. “She’ll bring up a specific tree and say, ‘This is what “Diet Pepsi” feels like.’ And if Addison Rae says that tree is ‘Diet Pepsi,’ that tree is ‘Diet Pepsi.’”

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of things Addison Rae loves. 

“I love a yogurt for breakfast,” she says after asking what I had to eat that morning. She’s effusive about everything: small dogs, candy, shopping, having stuff, Hollywood, every song we hear, a Christmas tree adorned with sea turtles (“It’s giving ‘Aquamarine,’ no?”), the movie Elemental, “a jewel tone,” vintage books, vintage magazines, when people let her order food for them, glamour, doing a British accent, saying “Love you” to total strangers.

After lunch, Rae takes me to Trashy Lingerie, a Los Angeles institution housed in a giant pink building. She’s in her element, piling the embellished, one-of-a-kind bustiers and panties into her arms and squealing at the top hats and the mannequins and the friendly dogs roaming the store. 

“I think glamour is just everything,” she had told me earlier in the day. The reinvention of Addison Rae has purposeful hints of Norma Jean-to-Marilyn Monroe; she’s dropped her Southern accent and swears she “used to be more country.”

“I want to be prim and poised,” she admits. “Marilyn Monroe never said ‘y’all.’”

For a long time, dancing  allowed Rae to find the poise she craved. “When life was chaotic, performing and using my body as a tool was something I could control,” she says. Rae began studying ballet, jazz, and contemporary styles when she was six. “It was an escape, to dance.”

Her childhood was rarely steady. Addison Rae Easterling was born in Lafayette, a city on the southern end of Louisiana, to makeup artist Sheri Nicole Easterling and real-estate manager Monty Lopez. Her parents, then unmarried, broke up shortly after Rae was born, though they would end up having two more kids, two ­weddings, and two divorces over the next 20 years. 

Thanks to the marital ups-and-downs as well as her dad taking on new jobs, her family jumped around, which was hard but helped her become the type of person who can adapt easily. “Moving schools a million times, I had to just keep making new friends,” she says. “If I get thrown into a scenario, I can figure it out pretty quickly.” Having grown up in a Catholic family and community, Rae attended multiple private, religious schools. A move to Houston marked the first time she attended public school, an overwhelming shift. Before she started high school, they moved again, this time to Shreveport. 

Along the way, Rae began dancing less and less, but it was an early dance studio that planted the idea of pop stardom in her head. She credits both her teachers and her mom’s MTV obsession with introducing her to the music that shaped her: Madonna and Michael Jackson videos; Lady Gaga’s debut album, The Fame; and fellow Louisiana native Britney Spears, who gave Rae hope that she could make it out of the bayou, too. “I remember being like, ‘Whoa, music is everything,’” she recalls. 

In 2020, when Lopez and Easterling moved with their sons, ages six and 12 at the time, to L.A., Rae’s TikTok presence was often a family affair. Lopez and Easterling danced alongside her, building their own followings on the app. “When social media opportunities were being brought to me, all I wanted to do was help people that I love and care about,” Rae says. “It made sense for me to keep my family involved. I think I was scared and I was alone. It was a lot to adjust to, and I had lived with my parents all my life, so it felt like the right thing to do at the moment.”

After a couple of years, the family dynamic began to fall apart. By 2022, Lopez and Easterling’s marriage was publicly crumbling, with tabloids and TikTok investigators piecing together clues from their posts for salacious stories, often involving other low-level influencers. Their second divorce was confirmed that November. 

At the time, Rae was silent about the drama, aside from unfollowing both her mom and dad. Eventually, her parents reached a better place, but the situation left a fracture. “I feel a lot of guilt for what my family experienced, and responsibility,” she says, about having pulled them into the fold of her fame. “I think it’s just unfortunate that it was exposed like it was.”

She began seeing a therapist and says her relationship with her parents is “always a work in progress.” (While she still hasn’t refollowed her dad on Instagram, she follows her mom again.) Easterling, Lopez, and Rae’s brothers moved back to Lafayette in 2023. Easterling remarried last year and has ­massively pulled back on her own social media presence. Lopez remains active on TikTok.

“[MAX MARTIN SAID], ‘THE ONLY WAY YOU’RE GOING TO REALLY PUSH YOURSELF [IS] TO SAY THINGS THAT ARE TRUE AND REAL. ONCE YOU SPILL IT OUT, YOU CAN ALWAYS TAKE IT DOWN, BUT IF YOU START SHALLOW, IT’S HARD TO BUMP IT UP.’”

“Everybody just wants to survive. Can’t blame them,” Rae adds. “I can only take responsibility for the things that I chose.”

Rae still believes in love. In fact, she loves love. “The Libra in me is a hopeless romantic,” she says. When I ask if she’s still dating Fedi, she confirms in a shy, quiet voice. Even though their three-year romance hasn’t been totally private (red-carpet appearances, social media posts, cozy pap shots), she says it’s the one topic that’s off limits.

“I’m very guarded when it comes to relationships, because my first public relationship taught me a lot about myself,” she says. In 2020, she began dating fellow creator Bryce Hall; they shared much of their courtship with their massive followings all over social media, dancing together, making vlogs.

“I think he cheated on me,” Rae says matter-of-factly. “He says he didn’t.”

When the relationship ended, Rae didn’t talk much about it; Hall, however, did. He repeatedly denied the cheating accusations. “That was a shit show,” she says. “He was very vocal about everything, and it was a mess.” 

She’s less angry now. “I believe there’s good in everyone, so I like to think there’s a good part of him,” she says. Hall has since become a celebrity boxer and one of the leading Gen Z MAGA bros. “We were really young,” Rae says. 

Rae doesn’t like to dwell on these memories; she’s not big on sadness, especially in her work. “I really struggle with being like, ‘All right, time to be sad and have just a guitar on the song,’” she says. “I applaud people that can do that. Sitting with your emotions in stillness is difficult.… I would actually be surprised if one day I write a really sad song, because I just can’t even imagine.”

“IT’D BE SO FUN to have a dog right now … a dog or a cigarette.”

Rae has driven us out to Malibu to watch the sun set over Lechuza Beach, a gorgeous, rocky stretch of sand. The entrance is like a secret garden, a shrouded staircase that is trying its best to hide from the throngs of visitors looking for this exact type of postcard-perfect view.

We spread out a feast from Erewhon over a couple of towels: chicken, Japanese potatoes, pomegranate seeds, pineapple. It’s a chilly afternoon, and we have the beach to ourselves. At least we thought we did.

“Is this a nude beach?” says a man who can’t be much older than 35. He is already fully naked, thankfully standing several feet away as he asks a question he seems to have already answered.

“You look like you’re having fun,” Rae says before he continues his walk along the water. When he’s out of earshot, Rae informs me that this is definitely not a nude beach. Inspired nonetheless, she strips off her blue silk button-down to let her black lace bustier air out.

“It would be so my luck if I took off all my clothes right now, that there would be paparazzi here,” she grumbles. Rae takes issue with a few misconceptions about her. For starters, she doesn’t let tabloid photographers know where she’ll be. “Don’t you think if I called the paparazzi I would look better in all these photos?” she says.

For all the excitement that follows her, Rae’s life is pretty quiet. She’s not big on partying. She’ll go out dancing but is a “lightweight” with drinking. She’ll smoke weed “occasionally,” and regardless of gossip-y assumptions online, she definitely does not do cocaine. “I have ADHD! I have a lot of energy, and I talk really crazy,” she says. “That’s just who I am.”

“TIKTOK DEFINITELY GAVE ME A LOT OF THINGS, SO IT WOULD BE REALLY SAD TO [SEE IT] GO, BUT HOPEFULLY THE THINGS THAT I CREATE AND PUT OUT SURPASS THAT PLATFORM.”

Rae has maintained several close relationships with some very famous friends. She pulls out a deck of cards Aubrey Plaza gave her while they were shooting the upcoming comedy Animal Friends last spring. Plaza and Dan Levy were the only cast members on location in Bulgaria before Rae joined them. While Plaza was pretty unfamiliar with Rae’s career, Levy knew her from an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians Rae appeared in back in 2021, when she was close with Kourtney Kardashian. (On the status of their friendship, Rae says, “She got married and has a baby now.… I’ve lived a few lives.”)

Levy and Plaza immediately hit it off with Rae. “The amazing thing about Addison is that where most people’s ego is, she just has creativity and curiosity,” Levy says. “That is such a rare quality in a person, especially somebody with her social media standing.”

The trio would play poker on set, eventually graduating to Bulgarian casinos. “Was she good? She got better,” Levy jokes. But her allure got her far. “She happened to sit by a professional poker player who was charmed by her and said, ‘Let’s put our money together, and I’ll make you a fortune.’” Rae walked out with over $1,000. Levy left empty-handed.

Rae played her demos for her new friends on set too, and they watched together as the accolades for “Diet Pepsi” rolled in. “I was like, ‘There’s my baby girl blowing up,’” Plaza says. “You could just tell she has a star quality.”  

Charli XCX has called Rae “a fucking genius,” and Rosalía echoes similar sentiments: “She’s the absolute project manager of her work and has a very clear vision of what she’s creating. Her choreographies seem so beautiful to me. I love how she brings the 2000s American pop star back to these days.”

AS THE SKY TURNS pink and the sun begins to set, Rae grows tired of talking about herself. She starts throwing questions my way: What kind of animal would I be? Would I ever be a nun? Will Rihanna ever release more music? (A lion, absolutely not, and I wish I knew, respectively.)

The most telling of them sneaks its way in as we contemplate feeding the seagulls: “Are you worried about the mean comments you’re going to get from interviewing me?”

No matter how much one adores fame, it can still be prickly. As Rae navigates her way into her new, post-social media era, she’s fascinated by how people cling to whatever idea they have of her, like she’s incapable of being edgy or cool or even weird or progressive. The replies on almost every post of hers still claim she’s racist and MAGA, largely from undeveloped political views she held as a preteen raised in a conservative environment, as well as a maybe-too-polite interaction with President Donald Trump a few years ago. (Her first and only political endorsement came in 2024, for Kamala Harris.) Rae is still growing and learning about herself and the world around her, even if people can’t see it that way. 

“People have decided who I am,” she says. She’s savored every curveball she’s been able to throw, though. She loves watching the surprise on people’s faces when they hear her music or see her daring red-carpet looks. But she still doesn’t mind leaning into the all-American side of herself. “I’ll be your girl next door,” Rae says, “but maybe there’s a wild side to the girl next door.”

 Rae may seem unbothered, but she’s still logged on. She knows everything she does starts a conversation, for better or worse. She sees the rumors and the questions and the misunderstandings. At the very least, she no longer worries that her career can persist in spite of it. She knows it can.

After our snacks, we go for a walk. The naked man is gone. The beach fills up, as more people arrive for the sunset with their dogs and their cigarettes and their own picnic spreads. We try to make perfect circles with our toes in the wet sand before heading to Lucky’s, a white-tablecloth steakhouse in Malibu, for dinner. I let Rae order for us: chili, steak, chicken parm, creamed corn, salad, a couple of mocktails. 

In the following weeks, news will spread that TikTok could be banned in the U.S. President Biden had signed legislation that would block the distribution of the app if parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it by Jan. 19. (The app would eventually shut down for 14 hours before President-elect Trump vowed to give the company an extension to find a buyer; its future remains unclear.)

As we talk, it seems that just as a new chapter begins, Rae’s most pivotal one may be closing for good. “That’s that full moon for me,” she says. “TikTok definitely gave me a lot of things, so it would be really sad to [see it] go, but hopefully the things that I create and put out surpass that platform.”

But there’s no need to dwell on the past. Her plans for the future are only as big as she can imagine: more movies, more songs, not to mention maybe playing her first headlining shows. All she can hope is that everything she does next will make people feel free and get them to dance  — and that she’ll continue to change minds along the way.

“But I won’t beg for it,” she says. “I’ll work for it.”