When Addison Rae says she loves roller coasters, she’s not talking about the wild ride she’s been on the last few years. “My dad used to force me on the craziest coasters when I was little, to get me to face my fears,” Rae says, as we sit midmorning over tea at a sidewalk table outside an unassuming coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley. Rae has convinced me to try her favorite iced matcha drink, a blend of powdered tea, oat milk, and lavender that sounds suspiciously like a spa bath.
Dizzying heights, unexpected twists and turns, and speed, especially speed, accurately describe the 20-year-old influencer’s rise on TikTok, Gen Z’s preferred social media platform. Not even a global pandemic could slow Rae, who’s gone from college freshman to social media phenomenon to multi-hyphenate creator-artist in the time it takes many of her peers just to declare a major. Her dancing, loose and effortless in her videos but the product of an entire childhood spent training, matched with a kind of offhand hotness that doesn’t take itself too seriously—reminiscent of her fellow Louisianan Britney Spears—has garnered Rae more than 100 million social followers. Now she has a debut album in the works, and Rae’s acting bona fides will be tested in August, when her first movie, He’s All That, a reboot of the ’90s teen rom-com, debuts on Netflix. Art imitates life in the story of Padgett Sawyer (Rae), a teen influencer who loses her online mojo, then schemes to get it back, a conceit that’s almost certain to resonate with her fans.
None of the patrons stopping in for their morning caffeine fix, however, seem to notice the social media crossover star hiding in plain sight. “Make sure you stir it,” Rae commands, gesturing toward my tea. “Just because there’s powder at the bottom. I don’t want you to have a bad experience.” She says this genuinely, like a close friend guiding me through an important rite of passage, a reminder that Rae is just as she describes—a “regular girl from Louisiana,” who doesn’t feel famous. When she picked me up for our interview in her own car, her blond-streaked hair twisted in a casual top knot, she looked every inch the college coed she was only a year and a half ago. That was when—early in her freshman year at LSU—the dancing videos she’d been posting for a couple of months started to go viral, racking up tens of thousands of likes at first, then hundreds of thousands, then, unimaginably, tens and hundreds of millions. By the time her fellow students were returning from their first winter break in January 2020, Rae had already moved herself and her entire family out to Los Angeles to devote everything she had to a career in entertainment. To say the move paid off is an understatement. Rae reportedly cleared $5 million last year from endorsements, modeling gigs, and her own beauty line, Item Beauty, to name just a few of her income streams.