It’s the day before Addison Rae releases her first EP entitled AR, and the TikTok megastar turned musician is in a reflective mood. “I feel very grateful and happy,” she says via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, wearing a vintage pink Marc Jacobs T-shirt with the slogan “Protect the skin you’re in” printed over a nude Chloë Sevigny. “I was a little nervous, but I’m less nervous now. I feel like I’ve had enough time with these songs and now I can breathe a sigh of relief because they’re finally going to be officially released.”
Even if releasing these songs in this manner was never the plan (more on that later), for Rae, making music was Always part of the plan. A bit like Britney Spears, another pop ingénue who rose to fame as a teenager, Rae was born in a modest Louisiana suburb; Despite a difficult childhood that included living in a mobile home, her early promises of becoming a performer led her parents to muster whatever they could to help her enter the world of competitive dance. What followed was years of grinding (and one might say it never ended) as she set her sights on Los Angeles and fame—a dream that came to fruition thanks to TikTok, which Rae first joined in 2019.
It’s surreal to think that it’s been less than four years since a handful of dancing teenagers shot to worldwide fame overnight—Rae now has 88.5 million followers on TikTok and 37 million on Instagram—but it’s even more surreal, as you might imagine, to experience This. . “I grew up as a huge MTV fan and watched all the music videos and recreated music videos in my bedroom and thought: I want to do this one day“she says about this whirlwind journey. “So it was always a dream, but it seemed like a very distant dream, you know? I feel like a lot of people have this dream, but it seems so far away. I grew up in Louisiana too…it’s a completely different world. It was crazy. But for me it always comes down to the joy of performing.”
Rae’s success also comes down to that sparkling charm and charisma that cannot be created, one that radiates even through the computer screen from which I sit some 5,000 miles away. But while that played one role in her rise into the stratosphere, another part was simply hard work. When she got her first acting role at Netflix He is all this She spent eight weeks intensively working with an acting coach, and when it came to business, she was one of the sharpest operators in her TikTok cohort, turning her success on the platform into a multi-million dollar beauty brand and multi-picture show. “creative partnership” with Netflix.