Reneé Rapp “started to do drugs” when she was in high school.
The 23-year-old star was “always performing” as a child but started to struggle with her grades in school as a teenager and eventually became a “really unhappy” person.
She said: “From the moment I had thoughts, I was like, ‘I wanna be Beyoncé. My dad kicked me out of the house once. But then when I actually left the house, he was like, ‘Where the f*** are you going?’ It was very confusing. I was always on stage and my parents turned everything into a performance opportunity. At my great-grandmother’s funeral, she was literally being sunk into the ground as I was singing ‘Amazing Grace’, because I was like: ‘How can I make this about me? My grades started to get really bad, “And I started to just… honestly, I started to do drugs in North Carolina. I was like, ‘Whatever, f***it.’ And I started to become a really unhappy person.”
Renee then decided to enter the National High School Musical Theatre Awards – which are more commonly known as the Jimmy Awards – after a girl at her school had done the same all in an attempt to gain an agent after choosing not to go to college and after winning the competition landed the lead role of Regina George in Broadway musical ‘Mean Girls.’
Renee – who is also set to star in the big screen adaptation of the movie musical based on the 2004 cult hit – told NME: “I told my parents I was going to do exactly what that girl did, and I did it. I knew those f****** were watching us every day in rehearsals, so there are videos of me on the internet with dagger eyes. “My friends mock me now, but I’m like, ‘Guys, I really did not want to go to college. I had to win so I could be seen by agents.’
“To be super-transparent, I loved doing Mean Girls on Broadway, but I was also very sick. I’ve struggled with an eating disorder my whole life and I had a lot of s*** happen during that time. And so my biggest thing right now is trying to prepare myself to go into the filming environment with a way healthier mindset. Because I don’t want to fall back into anything.”
