As Chappell Roan either bedazzled her grinder and applied red press-on nails during her recent cover story interview, she opened up about a range of topics that offer a window not just into her particularly crazy year but also into her voracious lists of interests and observations. From more industry double-standards to her Letterboxd account, here are some things we learned that we couldn’t fit into the cover story.
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Roan revealed she spent a lot of her summer pushing back on her label’s request to film a music video for her big hit, mostly because she didn’t really have time to make a good one. “I’m too tired,” she said, in between festival dates around the country and recording sessions for her next batch of music. “Do you know how hard it is to do a music video when you’re this exhausted and burnt?”
Like everything else in her career, Roan let her own instinct be a guide. “It’s a hit without a video,” she said, repeating what she told her team. “I have a Top 10 hit with a lyric video.”
She goes on to point out that success is never linear. What has worked for past hits won’t always work for future ones. “Isn’t that crazy that you don’t need everything you thought you needed to have millions of TikTok and Instagram? I didn’t have that when it first all started kind of blowing up, and I didn’t have video. I didn’t have a trend. I stood my ground and I said I’m not going to take every social opportunity. I’m not going to take every brand deal. I’m not going to take every suggestion, because at the end of the day, it’s me doing the manual labor that everyone else thinks I should just be doing.”
She’s become well-versed in the music industry’s double standards.
Roan is embodying a drag persona as a pop star. That means she sees a very huge difference between who she is on and off stage. Her big year has made it clear that to exist as a woman artist comes with caveats the men in her field don’t deal with. “One thing that makes me so upset because they don’t do it to boys is they always have to say my name,” she says, referring to non-profile articles and reviews. “Chappell Roan, in parentheses, Kayleigh Rose Amstutz. I was in the same article as Shaboozey, and they didn’t say Shaboozey’s real name. I notice it every time. They always say the girl’s name, their real name, because it’s like God forbid they can be fully an artist.”
She’s already thinking about what it will look like as she ages in this industry. “I don’t remember who said it, a woman comedian I think, who was like, ‘You are discarded after you are considered unfuckable,’” she quotes. “Such an insane double standard that I’m just realizing more and more as I get more successful and older. People only care about you just being really hot. That’s it. There couldn’t possibly be anything more interesting about you than being gorgeous, and that’s why I feel so comfortable dressing sometimes scary or really jarring.”
Her concert themes may not last forever.
Since Roan launched her first headlining tour in early 2023, she has built specific themes around each show, all based off her songs or lyrics. She encourages the audience to dress up accordingly. At a “My Kink Is Karma”-themed show, for example, the audience wore blindingly red clothes with some people going all out to recreate her music video look or simply sporting red cowboy hats or devil horns.
“I shot myself in the foot so hard with that decision because now I’m just like, ‘I don’t know what the themes are,’” she said, referring to fans asking how they should dress up as soon as tickets dropped for her live dates this year. “People love it so I do it for the people at this point because it really means a lot to them, and it means a lot to me. But now I’m stuck in all these fucking themes.”
She will, however, always have local drag queens open for her shows. “Look, I love the Drag Race girls , but sometimes they take up all the slots in towns because they’re on Drag Race , and the little queens just sometimes don’t have a platform as big. It’s important for people to know, ‘Oh my God, there are queens in my town. I had no idea.’”
Festivals have allowed her to explore the potential of her drag persona.
Before her career blew up, Roan used to make her video and stage outfits from scratch. Now, she and her team spend months whipping up the extravagant costumes for the stage. And many of these looks have been in the works since before she even saw her numbers explode. “Everything has to be planned months and months and months in advance because everything’s custom now, which is so awesome,” she explained. “No brand is making me a hot pink, glitter, latex wrestling suit. Everything has to be custom and it just takes a long time. For Lolla, we had planned it when I was on the Olivia tour, so February, March.”
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She’s been enjoying the way people have been looking forward to her looks with each show. “I think we are eventually going to run out of themes, so I’m dreading that, but I like to keep it weird and fresh because it’s exciting for the fans to be like, ‘Oh my God, what is she going to walk out in?’ You’re always excited to see what a drag queen wears. It’s like, ‘What is she going to wear tonight?’ She could be anything. Why are you doing this if you’re just going to take it so seriously?”
Keeping a band ain’t easy
“Dude, it is hard in the fucking music industry to find women,” Roan admitted. She’s been trying to maintain a close to consistent band of girls to back her at her shows but many are in demand, have other projects or just hard to find. “It’s hard to find a band. It’s just hard to find girls, girls who rock, and girls who rock and are okay with wearing latex in 100 degrees.”
She goes back to summer camp every year
Roan credits much of her growth as a person and artist to attending summer camp. She attended a few but there is one in the Pacific Northwest she returns to either get some down time or to offer mentorship. She attended this summer’s camp to do a lecture and Q&A with the aspiring artists who attend to offer insight on the industry and her experiences.
“Summer camp just makes me feel like it’s not about me, and that’s what I really struggle with is just feeling like everything is so about me,” she explained. “My whole life is just like ‘me, me, me’ and it just feels so selfish. It feels so delusional. I get why a lot of people become assholes because you just feel like everything should be about you all the time.”
Even as her career continues to blow up, she hopes she can find the time to return every year. “I like giving back to a community. It makes me feel like a good person, and it just makes me happy to be around kids who are just like me when I was 16. To give back to kids who want to do this exact job is really special and not something that the music industry can offer.”
Sasha Colby dubbed Roan an official member of the Colby drag family.
Roan has made no secret of her immense fandom of RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Sasha Colby, a drag legend whose phrase “your favorite drag queen’s favorite drag queen” inspired one of Roan’s first big viral moments. Colby and Roan finally met in July when the drag superstar joined the pop superstar on stage at Capitol Hill Block Party.
“She officially named me a Colby,” Roan gushed. “She’s the best. She looked amazing. It was just like, damn, through this job I get to meet people I look up to a lot. It just made me feel really important and good about myself.”
She has a list of horror movies on Letterboxd.
Roan is a big horror movie fan and had tickets to see Long Legs a few days after our first interview in LA. She excitedly whipped out her phone to show me the list of horror movies she wants to watch that she stores on her private Letterboxd account, mostly the truly “horrifying” type of scary movies produced in Japan, Taiwan and other Asian markets. Some recent horror movies she enjoyed were Talk to Me (“I thought that was so special for a horror movie to make me cry”) and Barbarian .
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