Gracie Lawrence never got the typical college experience. The musician-slash-actress spent much of her freshman year out on the road with her band, dropping out after just two semesters to focus on music. This fall, though, she finally feels like a real coed—now that she's among the new students on the Essex College campus in season 3 of The Sex Lives of College Girls.
Lawrence plays transfer student Kacey, introduced on the third episode of the Max hit. Though their personalities clash at first, the Southern Belle becomes the de facto new member of Bela (Amrit Kaur), Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet), and Whitney's (Alyah Chanelle Scott) friend group, taking over the vacancy in their suite when Leighton (Reneé Rapp) makes the difficult decision to switch schools.
SLOCG marks the 27-year-old’s biggest on-screen role to date, but it's hardly her first performance. The New York-born artist (and daughter of filmmaker Marc Lawrence) grew up on Broadway, taking small roles in film and TV as a child, though her large focus for nearly the past 15 years has been her band Lawrence, which she fronts with her brother, Clyde. The indie pop group has released viral hits like 2021’s “Don’t Lose Sight,” joined the Jonas Brothers on tour, and opened even for legends like The Rolling Stones. In June, they dropped their fourth album Family Business; she was busy finishing the projecting while preparing all her theater kid energy to take on the character of Kacey.
“There's something very fun about having the music side of my life be that I am playing myself—I'm the subject of my own work,” Lawrence tells Marie Claire over Zoom three weeks before her debut. “Then there's this other side of it where I get to play someone so different than me in so many ways. That provides a really nice balance in my life.”
Lawrence spoke with us about her band's untraditional trajectory, her exchange with Rapp before the pop star left the show, and what it was like joining an already-established cast.
Marie Claire: What was it like in the Lawrence household growing up? Were you always putting on performances?
Gracie Lawrence: My earliest memories are of my older brother Clyde sitting on the piano, and it was us, my parents, and then later my little brother, all gathered and singing or talking. It’s why our second album is called Living Room because our living room was a place where music was played. My parents don't work in music, but they both do things in the arts, and are huge music fans, so it's been a huge part of my life.
I think the thing I appreciate the most about my family is those early performances when I was 4 or 5-years-old singing a song—they were treated as seriously as I felt they were.
MC: You grew up in New York. Was that creatively fulfilling?
GL: Growing up in New York, obviously, you're surrounded by music, theater, all of it. Even when you take the subway anywhere, there's usually a musician performing, and I remember when I was a kid, my parents stopping and watching that. That always stuck with me that things are being made everywhere and you can stop and appreciate all of those things.
When [Clyde and I] were in middle school and high school, we would perform at little clubs that seated 20 people, places where you do an open mic and they let you have a slot a different night. We would do those performances on weekends or holiday breaks, whenever we could fit them in. From there it was a very gradual growth to what is now Lawrence.
MC: It’s very cool you started playing live shows so young and had a built-in partner with your brother, especially since there are so few all-ages venues.
GL: There are opportunities when you're a kid to audition for movies, TV, and theater—and I got into that really young—but on the music side, the opportunity to be a professional musician, the roadmap for that is unclear. Clyde and I both knew we wanted to do music from such a young age, and the way in which we got into it was just finding whatever opportunities we could to perform, whether that be in New York for 10 people at a bar that they would let us go to if our parents attended—because we needed to have a guardian there—or at our school and playing for our friends. We created our own path; we were always seeking out opportunities to try out material.
I used to get in trouble because they wouldn't let me into my own shows. Even if I showed up with someone else in the band who was over 18 or over 21, they would be like, ‘You are not allowed to come play.’ I'd be like, ‘That's my face on the tour poster.’ That happened all the time.
MC: That’s too funny. And on the side, you were auditioning for on-screen and on-stage acting roles. When did you realize that was also a niche you wanted to explore?
GL: I was really interested in performing in general from a really young age, and specifically was always really interested in comedy. I was obsessed with watching comedy specials as a kid, and so my mom was like, ‘Maybe you should take an acting class. I think you might enjoy that.’ I really liked it and wanted to flex that muscle. So, I started auditioning for things.
Shout out to my mom who would take me to all the auditions. I have the least stage-parent parents. They didn't push me into it in any way. I was begging to do it. My mom would come to these auditions with me and I ended up getting a few things. I was in a Broadway show when I was 12 and little TV roles and movie roles here and there for my whole childhood and adolescence. This role on The Sex Lives of College Girls is certainly the biggest role in a TV show I've ever had and maybe the biggest role period, and that's exciting. I've been auditioning for things since I was 9 and I'm 27, so it's a long time.
MC: What comedy were you into as a kid?
GL: There was that Ellen DeGeneres special—she had a whole bit about procrastination and it tied up at the end and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that's so interesting. You can make something that has a thread that goes through the whole thing.’
I was obsessed with My Cousin Vinny—which is a movie that is so inappropriate for a 5-year-old—but I thought it was the funniest thing ever. I think my parents were just like, ‘You shouldn't talk like that, so don't use the words in this, but if you can intellectually differentiate between what you're watching and then what you say in preschool, so you can watch this.’ I immediately understood people were playing characters.
Also, shouts out to The Lizzie McGuire Movie—specifically Miss Ungermeyer. I was really drawn to women doing comedy. And I watched SNL from a young age and was so obsessed with it. My dad would show me a lot of Gilda Radner stuff.
MC: Coming into The Sex Lives of College Girls as the new roommate who replaces Reneé Rapp’s character Leighton, did you feel any pressure or have any conversations with Rapp about it?
GL: No, I didn't feel pressure because I felt like it was a completely different role and they weren't asking for anyone to fill anyone's shoes. That wasn't what it felt like to me, especially. They were also bringing in another new series regular [Taylor] played by Mia Rodgers. I felt like they were trying to build out the world of the friend group a little bit more.
I didn't have any scenes with Reneé because I come in after she leaves, but there was one day we met once because they were cross-shooting— where you are shooting multiple episodes at the same time. She was arriving while I was leaving, and we had a very brief, lovely moment like, ‘Oh my God, hi, how are you?’ And a hug. We both knew each other's music and were mutual fans of each other in the music world, so that was a fun hello.
MC: Did it make you nervous coming into an established show and cast? Or did you find yourself surprised by anything?
GL: I was nervous because I had watched the show and was a fan of the show before joining the cast, so I had this anxiety about joining something that I already loved. There's an excitement there, but there's also an added fear. I would walk into these sets that I knew, and I had this bizarre, trippy experience where I was walking into the TV like, ‘I know this cafeteria. This is so weird.’
Before I even arrived on set, I got messages from everyone. Then got there and every day everyone was reaching out to be a mentor or to give guidance because, yeah, you are walking into something that is a well-oiled machine and has operated already for two seasons. Even dumb things like, ‘And where do we eat lunch?’ There's a first day of school energy where everyone remembered what it was like to be new on the set, so they all rallied around me and provided so much warmth and help, which was so cool.
MC: After being on tour with Lawrence where you’re the only girl in the band, did you feel a different, feminine energy on The Sex Lives of College Girls set?
GL: It's true: I'm in a band with seven guys, and then I stepped into a show that's so female-centric. It was a nice change of pace. Those guys are brothers to me, both literally for one of them and then emotionally for the rest of them. So that experience is always the best because it's second nature. It's hanging out with my family. But it was really nice to be surrounded by a group of girls that are all sort of the same age.
The thing that was most significant about that to me was I went to college for a year and then dropped out. But even within that year, I was only attending college for a semester. I did the rest of the year on the road, so I never really had a proper college experience. It was kind of—not life imitating art—but art providing an experience that life didn't provide. I felt like being on set was very collegiate. We were on the Warner Brothers lot; you're essentially on campus. So many of our scenes were in this dorm room that we really did live in; between takes, we would all go to some of our rooms and chill there.
There's a first day of school energy where everyone remembered what it was like to be new on the set, so they all rallied around me and provided so much warmth and help, which was so cool.
MC: In the first episode Kacey’s introduced, she has a melodramatic confrontation at a party. What was it like knowing you were debuting the character that way?
GL: That was the first scene that I shot for the whole show, which was kind of interesting to shoot because, in some ways, it's just one side of the character. It's almost like this hidden side of the character coming out, so that's a funny thing to play first. But at the same time, I was so relieved that that was the first scene because I was so nervous and amped up and had all this adrenaline. Having a scene where you don't have to be very controlled or subtle was a nice way to start. What I was doing on the exterior was sort of how I was feeling on the interior: just panic and the craziest side of myself.
MC: Kacey is a performer like yourself and at one point in the season she performs “Roar” by Katy Perry at a musical theater audition. Was that song choice written in the script?
GL: It was written into the script. If I remember correctly, it was going to be a pop song that ‘felt Kacey-ish.’ I got into the studio, there were a few songs, and we did recordings of them. Then when I got to set, [the showrunner] Justin felt really strongly about it being ‘Roar’ and thought it fit with what the character was going through. The other ones were great options, but they were unrelated to the storyline, so I understood that choice.
It also fit with the character new to the theater world—where they wouldn't choose a musical theater song. They would choose a pop song that they grew up loving and that felt like what they were going through in that moment.
I ended up singing it live. We did a few takes where I would lip sync to my voice, and then at the end, [Justin] was like, ‘I feel like this is going to be better if you just do it fully live.’
MC: Do you consider yourself a theater kid like Kacey?
GL: I do. Kacey’s whole thing is that she makes fun of theater kids, even though she kind of wants to be one, which is sort of a feature of hers in general. She tends to be a little reticent to open herself up to new things, but once she gets there, she wants to be a part of them so badly.
I definitely feel like I grew up being a theater kid. I grew up in New York City, so I would go see theater.I was in all my school plays, was on Broadway, and any theater opportunity I could be a part of, I jumped at. It's very funny for me to be saying these lines where I'm making fun of theater kids—essentially making fun of myself.
The part of the character I had the most empathy for was her outward confidence and hidden well of insecurity.
MC: In Lawrence, you mean a lot to your fans as both a frontwoman and because you sing candidly about your anxieties. SLOCG is similarly beloved for how relatable it is, and Kacey has a lot of insecurities herself. What has it been like to have a platform to explore that in a new way or relate to the character in that way?
GL: There was a lot of symmetry between what Kacey is going through and confronting with the kinds of songs that I like to write in Lawrence and that was not lost on me. I think it was a wonderful coincidence, or maybe it's part of why I got the job. I definitely noticed that the part of the character I had the most empathy for was her outward confidence and hidden well of insecurity. That's certainly something that I've written a lot about and that Clyde and I have written a lot about in Lawrence, specifically, our songs ‘i'm confident that i'm insecure’ or ‘Freckles.’ We're a band that is seven guys and one girl, and yet some of our songs have a very feminine lean. I think it's because I work with guys, and specifically my brother, who is so interested in my perspective, which is really lucky and fortunate.
In terms of the show, I think Kasey prides herself on her confidence and walking into any room and having things go her way or saying how she feels. But I think any person who is a fish out of water in a brand new environment, her entire worldview is about to be threatened. And so her confidence in herself, how she feels about anything, confidence in her own opinions, that's about to be threatened too, and all this insecurity that she's hidden for her whole life is inevitably going to peek through when she's around this new group of friends who see her for who she really is for the first time. That was relatable to me, and I'm happy to have that symmetry in the music that Clyde and I write, as well as this role, that I didn't have any part in writing, but am lucky enough to get to represent.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
