The working-class girl who reinvents herself as a star is a classic, aspirational figure in the greater American mythos. After all, before Marilyn Monroe became the blonde bombshell who rocked the film industry, she was Norma Jeane Baker, a cute brunette working at a munitions factory in Van Nuys, California. Likewise, before there was Addison Rae, the Los Angeles-based TikTok dancer with 88.4 million followers, there was Addison Rae Easterling, a cheerleader from Louisiana with big dreams. And after more than half a decade of dancing to other people’s songs, that Louisiana–turned–California girl is now ready to bet on herself again in a whole new way—by becoming a bona fide pop star.
I meet the flaxen-haired 24-year-old on a Sunday morning in March, inside her manager’s Beverly Hills office, a Spanish-style villa surrounded by tall, manicured hedges. (Rae calls it her second home; her first home is not her actual residence, she says, but her car.) She answers the door barefoot, wearing a black satin halter dress and two Hello Kitty pimple patches on her cheek. “My skin is better in Louisiana,” she says, gesturing toward her face. In a show of Southern hospitality, she hands me two Blue Bottle cups. “I didn’t know what you liked, so I got you a cold brew and a cherry blossom matcha!”
Rae plants herself on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’s just returned to Los Angeles from Iceland, where she spent about a week shooting a music video for her new synth-pop song, “Headphones On.” Directed by Mitch Ryan, the video sees her transform from a convenience store checkout girl to a pink-haired Lady Godiva, galloping on a pony on a black sand beach. She shows me her manicure, revealing 10 pointy little Iceland flags on her fingers. As she speaks, she wiggles her glitter-flecked toes just inches away from the fire, literally vibrating with exhilaration. “Iceland was really fun and transformative,” Rae says. “We saw the northern lights!”
Despite yearning for a warm weekend in Cabo (“I’m begging my team to find, like, three days where I can go to Mexico,” she says), Rae is preparing to spend the next few weeks in Chicago, where she’s filming a movie called Animal Friends with Aubrey Plaza and Dan Levy that’s due out this fall. She teases that the role is a departure for her—she played a teen influencer in the 2021 Netflix rom-com He’s All That, and a bubbly best friend in Eli Roth’s 2023 slasher flick, Thanksgiving. “It’s definitely a 180 from everything else I’ve done,” Rae says. “I’m really playing a character in this one. In my other projects, I’ve not really played someone much different from myself. He’s All That was pretty on the nose for my life at the time—being the influencer. And same with Thanksgiving—I was kind of playing myself.”
But after years of curating herself meticulously for the camera, both as an influencer and in her acting roles, Rae is now most excited about her music. Last fall, Rae joined club kid royalty Charli XCX at Madison Square Garden to perform Charli’s remix of the Grammy-winning Brat track “Von Dutch”; she’s become a muse to photographer Petra Collins and has been styled by Law Roach. Now, with a debut album out on Columbia Records later this year, Rae is pirouetting her way into the global pop vanguard. “I feel like I’ve surpassed Addison Rae,” she says. “It’s just Addison now.”
Her methods are provocative, even if whimsical—she’s a born entertainer. Last year, she was snapped by paparazzi wearing a plastic-looking clamshell bra and electric blue fishnets as pants, on the day she released her lush house single “Aquamarine.” (“Sometimes it’s about what you don’t wear,” Rae says coyly.) And when rumors briefly spread online that cocaine was fueling her happy-go-lucky persona, she defiantly blew plumes of powdered sugar off a Café Du Monde beignet in the video for “High Fashion,” and then rolled around in the sweetness. Both a pop coquette and quirked-out performance artist, Rae’s biggest forte is harvesting our attention and spinning it into gold. “In life, everyone acts,” she says. “We’re all putting on a show, aren’t we?”
Rae was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, the first of three children to Sheri Nicole Easterling and Monty Lopez. Easterling worked as a makeup artist and Lopez in real estate. Rae’s parents divorced not long after she was born and later reunited, marrying in 2017 and then divorcing again in 2022. Rae lived with her mom growing up, moving between towns and cities in Louisiana, and also for a spell in Houston, Texas. She attended private religious schools and began taking dance classes at the age of six, setting the stage for her passion early on. “My family sacrificed a lot to get me in dance classes and to put me in a nice school,” Rae says. “It was never easy, and I thank my parents a lot for that.”
She says she got her sense of Southern hospitality from her mom. Rae might be famous now, but she’ll still greet strangers on her walk to the nearest coffee shop and strike up a conversation with the barista once she gets there. “I value a sense of community where I am, so being a regular makes me happy,” Rae says. She’s had to learn some boundaries, though: “It actually might be dangerous to let somebody in your car for a ride,” she says with a laugh.
Like many Southern belles before her, in 2019, after high school, Rae enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she planned to join the dance team, hoping to catch her big break on the sidelines of a Tigers game. But when she didn’t make the team, which would have paid her a stipend, her parents told her it was going to be tough to make the college economics work, even though they’d moved to be closer to campus so Rae could live at home.
She began pursuing a major in broadcast journalism, but found herself “struggling really hard, because it’s fucking miserable to write papers about shit you don’t care about,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, what am I going to do?’ I really just wanted to perform. I wanted to honor the passion and desire to entertain that was inside of me, but I also didn’t want to struggle, and make my family struggle, as a result of that dream.”
Feeling an intense amount of pressure on her young shoulders, she walked into her college counselor’s office and said she needed to switch her major to dentistry—a field where she felt she could make a good living and not worry about finding a job. But she was torn. She’d also joined a then little-known app called TikTok and was beginning to grow her following. “I asked my counselor, like, ‘What do I do?’” she says. “And she was like, ‘Girl, LSU will be here forever.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, I need to drop out.’ I just had this really strong intuition and gut feeling that, as unrealistic as it seemed, I needed to do it—there’s no time like now to try and chase those dreams.”
She begged her parents to let her move to Los Angeles. To keep expenses low, she moved in with the family of a friend she had met online. “I was so thankful for them,” Rae says, “because I don’t know how I would have ever made that work otherwise.” Before long, she had signed with the behemoth talent agency William Morris Endeavor and began pursuing every job opportunity she could get her hands on. “I was doing any sponsored video I could do to make money to try and make this work for myself,” Rae says. “That’s why I was posting so much. I was like, ‘There’s only one chance.’ It was a big bet to make, and I knew I would hate myself if I didn’t try as hard as I could to make this happen.”
Beauty Tip: Give your makeup a radiant finish with the Guerlain Terracotta Le Teint Healthy Glow Foundation.
After signing with WME, she asked her parents to move to L.A., too, telling them she didn’t know how she was going to live this life alone. So they found a way to get themselves to the West Coast city, even joining TikTok, dancing alongside their daughter. At times, her parents’ tit-for-tat relationship conflicts have blown up fantastically on TikTok; Rae says she now refrains from checking her parents’ social media. “My family has taken a step back and become much more private,” she notes. “Family is always tricky, but at the end of the day, you love them and you take the good and try to leave the bad in the past. Nobody’s perfect.”
As Rae’s following swelled, she continued documenting her life gratuitously for the cameras, signing off each video with her dazzling, beauty queen smile. “It was an intense period of my life—there was a lot of work that went into us living there—but I also had so much fun while I was doing it all,” she says. “I wasn’t going to let being cringe and posting a million videos stop me. And now that I look back at it, I don’t feel embarrassed about anything I ever posted. I can appreciate that girl and say that was a girl who was going to make it happen, no matter what that meant doing.”
“And I wasn’t doing anything harmful,” she adds. “I was just having a dandy time dancing.”
Making the transition from social media to pop stardom was always going to be an uphill battle. In March of 2021, she released the squeaky-clean track “Obsessed”—“I’m obsessed with me-e-e as much as you”—which was widely panned by critics. It was a blow to her nascent music career, and she considered giving up on the idea altogether. But eventually, she went back into the studio to work on more songs, which were unceremoniously leaked online the following year. She has said she has no idea how the songs got out, and was crushed, but then something amazing happened: The tracks became sleeper hits online. Charli XCX even contacted her to feature on the song “2 Die 4.”
Her creative team on the debut album includes songwriter-producer duo Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd of MXM studios, the publishing company founded by Grammy-winning Swedish songwriter Max Martin, who is also one of modern pop’s biggest queen-makers. Their first song together became Rae’s first Billboard Hot 100 hit, 2024’s “Diet Pepsi.” The method to their magic, say the duo, is girl talk. “Half of these songs are just picking up our conversations about life,” Anderfjärd says. “It’s us giggling—we’re like, ‘No way we can say that.’ And then we’re like, ‘Just do it!’ ”
Arca, the Venezuelan producer and musician, says over email that Rae is “fluent in the language of connecting with the collective through pop. But she also embraces the darker, more textural, experimental and avant-garde transgressions that pop allows—just as much as she loves its euphoric, luminous side.” Arca remixed Rae’s 2024 single “Aquamarine” by stripping it down to its sultry vocal tracks, then adorned them with a spectral echo of a dembow rhythm. This became what they eventually dubbed “Arcamarine.” “I feel an almost sisterly urge to be there for her, without expecting anything in return, just because of the bravery she’s shown,” Arca adds. “To fly in the face of judgment, to be bold enough to experiment, play, and build.”
When it comes to the music she wants to create, Rae’s not so much married to a genre, but to the level of joie de vivre she can articulate in a song. “Growing up as a dancer was such a natural transition into that sound,” Rae says. “I was interested in how that music made you feel, and how it made your body move. I think music is mind control—it opens up this portal of energy.”
She devises her dance moves with creative consultant Lexee Smith, whom she flagged down at a party two years ago. “It was like, bestie at first sight,” says Smith, who’s often seen undulating and contorting in edgy poses with Rae on social media. She also helps Rae conceptualize her visuals, down to the edits of her music videos—they practice meditating on a vision to make it come to life. “When we first met, Addison was showing me moodboards for the album,” Smith says. “She is the Pinterest queen. Now everything has come true. It’s so weird. It keeps happening. We’re like little fairies.”
Rae’s hit “High Fashion” began with a Pinterest post that made her laugh: “It was like, ‘Fuck cocaine—let’s get high on fashion!’” she recalls. “It was like, ‘I don’t need your drugs.’ As in, ‘I don’t need this person’s addictive energy in my life, I’d rather have high fashion,’” Rae explains. She shot the video for the song in her home state of Louisiana. “It was really important for me to film in Louisiana, because I feel like it’s a reflection of the way I felt growing up and then moving to L.A.—you know, the Wizard of Oz of it all,” Rae says. “I just felt like a fish out of water, in a way. But I always knew I wanted to be famous, to be a movie star, to be a singer—to just be a performer. That was always something I wanted—the glamour and the fashion. It’s almost like I’m convincing myself in this song, like, ‘No, I don’t want this—I want the fashion, I want the childhood dreams, I want that life. Don’t forget, don’t fall in love—you’d rather get these dreams accomplished.’”
She groans when I ask about her actual love life; she’s been linked to Grammy-nominated producer Omer Fedi for nearly four years. But instead of diving into their relationship, she demurs, saying, “I think all relationships in my life right now are going through a transformation in a lot of ways, whether that’s good or bad or confusing or not. And I think it’s just a lot of self-confrontation right now in these moments, and just figuring out what I really want to do and what feels right.”
What does feel right is being at a point in her career where she can pick and choose. “I have the luxury now to say no to things I’m not interested in, or that don’t feel like me or aren’t reflective of who I am. It’s still a job, at the end of the day. Everybody is trying to survive—I’m trying to survive and live here and do all these things that I love—but I definitely have become more intentional, because I do think saying no to things opens up a door for a much better yes.”
She knows some people will always see her as the cheerleader from Louisiana—“It’s like, ‘So what? You wish you were a cheerleader, and I was,’” she says—and millions of others will always associate her with TikTok. She doesn’t regret any of it. “All of that led me to where I am right now,” she says. But she does wish people would let her move on. “What’s funny to me is that people assume that these passions are new. First of all, no one ever even knew who I was before I was a freshman in college, so it’s like, ‘How would you even know what my interests were before?’ I grew up dancing; I’ve always loved to sing,” she says. “I acknowledge how lucky I am that I was on TikTok, and people cared enough to watch my videos and follow me, and therefore gave me the freedom to be able to explore my deep desires that I’ve always had. It’s like, ‘What am I going to do? Not chase my dreams because I feel like I haven’t done enough school to get here? Or I haven’t had enough experience?’ It’s like, ‘No, the door opened for me, and I’m going to go through and explore it.’”
Rae has seen the criticism that her music career feels performative, inauthentic, or like it was all heavily curated by an incredible team. “I wish,” she jokes. “I totally get why people may feel like this isn’t who I really am. But it’s like, ‘No, maybe I didn’t want to show you who I really was because I was afraid of confronting that, and I was afraid of what people would say about it.’”
She’s learned not to care, and says she knows “it’s not my job to persuade anybody how to feel about me, or if they think I’m cool or not,” she says. “As long as every day I feel like I’m putting out things I’m proud of and inspiring people, then I have no complaints....I’m succeeding at what I want to do.
“I’ve definitely gotten much further than I expected to,” she adds. “And I do thank L.A. for that, honestly, because the world seemed so small when I lived in Louisiana. And the world feels so much bigger here.”
Hair by Clayton Hawkins for K18; makeup by Leah Darcy; manicure by Natalie Minerva for OPI; set design by Evan Jourden; produced by Zach Crawford at Crawford & Co Productions.
This story appears in the May 2025 issue of ELLE.
