Reneé Rapp 'hated' filming the first season of The Sex Lives of College Girls. Now she's leaving.

Reneé Rapp has announced she's stepping back from The Sex Life of College Girls mid-way through season three.

She will still appear as Leighton Murray in a handful of episodes, but the 23-year-old actress will no longer be a series regular on the show.

"College Girls moved me out to LA and introduced me to some of my favourite people. Two and a half years later – it's given me y’all and this community," she wrote on social media. 

"Thank you, Mindy [Kaling], Justin [Noble] and everyone at Max for believing in me."

"A lot of queer work gets belittled – but playing Leighton has changed my life. I love who I am 10x more than I did before knowing her. I hope she gave y’all a little bit of that too," she added.

Watch the trailer for The Sex Lives of College Girls here. Post continues below.

Rapp was 14 years old when she discovered she likes girls.

Growing up in the South, the actor noticed a classmate who looked different from the others and would never wear a bra. Rapp would catch herself staring.

The moment she realised that was because she was attracted to her, The Sex Lives of College Girls star went home, had a panic attack, and cried.

"I had a meltdown and was like, 'Oh my god, I'm gay. Damn it," she recalled when appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast.

Rapp was born and raised in Huntersville, Carolina. She only knew one other person who was queer, and her family didn't view them or their sexuality as a good thing.

"I had never heard anything surrounding [being queer] in a positive way," she said. "The one person that I knew in my life who, I really looked up to, got absolutely shat on by everyone in our family."

"All I ever heard, and she was bisexual at the time, was, 'Well, she needs to pick a side'." 

At that point, Rapp told herself she too had to pick a side. And since she liked girls, she concluded she was a lesbian.

Rapp called her friend, she recalled, and fighting through tears, told her the news. But she knew she was also attracted to boys.

Now 23, Rapp left Huntersville for New York when she graduated high school and landed the role of Regina George in Broadway's Mean Girls the Musical.

Then in October 2020, the actor was cast as Leighton Murray, one of the four leads in Mindy Kaling's HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls.

Rapp's character is a private school-educated popular girl who's out of her element at Essex College. 

She's sassy and stand-off-ish, something you learn is a coping mechanism for masking various insecurities, including coming to terms with being queer.

Image: HBO.

Rapp herself identifies as bisexual. She's dated men and women. But before the TV show, she never really "came out".

"I was laughed at every time I tried to," she told Call Her Daddy host Alexandra Cooper. "So then I never really talked about it and I had always just said I was just one of those people who never really felt like they had to come out."

"To be honest, I feel like my genuine coming out to my family, close and extended, has been doing Sex Lives of College Girls." 

Although she's grateful to be out and accepted, she acknowledges she didn't receive the same support when she was younger.

"Now that part of me is on display in a very palatable way, which I think is also kind of f**ked up," she said. "So I resent it in a lot of ways... it's still really, really hard."

It was especially hard when filming the first season, before audiences or her family could see her character and how similarly she mirrored the actor's own experience.

"The first year doing Sex Lives of College Girls was terrible. It was terrible. It sucked so bad," Rapp said.

Image: HBO.

When filming season one, Rapp was in a hetero-normative relationship and "hated going to work because I didn't think I was good enough to be here".

She would go home after a day on set and psyche herself out.

"I will never forget, I called one of my friends and said, 'I'm straight. I think I'm just straight. I can't do this'," she recalled.

"I was in a panic constantly... And I wasn't [straight], but I was so freaked out by the idea of bisexuality not being finite, or people laughing at me or me laughing at myself, that I hated the first year of filming."

When shooting, she would have crew, mostly men she admits, come up to her and ask whether she was actually gay or just playing the role.

"It made me second guess everything about myself," she said. "I felt like... to no one else's real fault, except for my childhood and formative years, I was beating myself up so much."

"It was so much the first season." 

Rapp's career has skyrocketed since the TV show premiered. 

She's primarily a singer and recently released her EP 'Everything to Everyone'. 

In December 2022, it was announced that she would reprise her role as Regina George in the Mean Girls the Musical film adaptation.

Feature image: HBO.