Yahoo Lifestyle Allow Us to Reintroduce the Class of ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’
“New year, new me” is a common mantra come January. But for the cast of The Sex Lives of College Girls, life really couldn’t be more different in 2025. As the show airs its third season, the original Essex College quad transformed into a trio, saying goodbye to Reneé Rapp’s Leighton before adding two new faces—actors Mia Rodgers and Gracie Lawrence—to the class roster. Meanwhile, Pauline Chalamet’s, Amrit Kaur’s, and Alyah Chanelle Scott’s characters felt change in the wind as they headed into their sophomore year at college.
All the newness reflects in the actors’ personal lives, too. Just last year, Pauline Chalamet gave birth to a baby girl. After our photo shoot, Amrit zipped straight to rehearsals for What We’re Up Against, the off-Broadway play she’s starring in, while Alyah was a few weeks away from announcing her own involvement off-Broadway, this time starring in All Nighter after years working behind the scenes as a Tony-winning producer. And then there’s Mia Rodgers and Gracie Lawrence.
While SLOCG is hardly Mia’s first series, the British actor is now making her way to U.S. audiences as Taylor, a freshman at Essex who leans on Bela. Meanwhile, Gracie—who is known for her work in the eight-piece band Lawrence, famous for TikTok-viral songs like “Whatcha Want” and “Don’t Lose Sight”—is taking her talents to the screen as Kacey, a Southern belle who clashes with the group at first.
Cosmopolitan caught up with the entire new cast of The Sex Lives of College Girls in New York City, and we can confirm—much like their characters, the actors have reacted to change the same way: by bonding even further. Read on for a cast discussion about mixing old dynamics with new, growing up with the characters they play, and finding the right balance between comedy and reality.
The Sex Lives of College Girl season 3 kicked off with a lot of change, most notably the departure of Reneé Rapp and her character Leighton.
“It happens as quickly in life as it did on the show. We say goodbye to Reneé, we go back to our room, and Gracie has appeared. So it was honestly a very quick and fast transition,” Alyah said of the new cast dynamic. “I also think the nature of a group of girls is that we’re gonna just gab, so we immediately just gabbed. And it was a fun energy change on set, which we embraced very openly.”
The show introduced two new students: Gracie’s character, Kacey, became the girls’ new roommate after transferring to Essex to be closer to her boyfriend. And Mia’s character, freshman Taylor, immediately got close to Bela, as her Freshman Advisor and friend.
“I think the interesting thing of being able to welcome these new characters is that we were able to also see new facets of Whitney, Kimberly, and Bela because of how they interacted with them,” Pauline said.
While Kacey seemed to have zero interest in getting to know her roommates, Gracie herself said the experience was the total opposite IRL and she “felt very welcomed in because everyone reached out to me before I even got there, which was so sweet. I felt the first-day-of-school energy.” But that wasn’t the thing that got to her most. “Even for actors, it’s a pretty unusual experience to jump into a show that is a preexisting hit show that they’re a fan of. So to have this weird experience where I was on the sets that I knew so well and having scenes with characters that I had watched on my computer or my TV was such a trippy experience.”
Mia said she was initially “starstruck” meeting her new costars. “I absolutely adored these women as actresses and as people. I obviously didn’t know you, but I had this idea of you on a screen and as actresses in this world that I’m now joining, but I’ve always wanted to be a part of.”
“Getting starstruck” is honestly just another day in the life on set, especially when comedy legend Mindy Kaling is one of the cocreators of the series. There are icons like Tig Notaro and Rebecca Wisocky as well, just two of the superstar guest actors this season, and with more class options at Essex available, the stars definitely have some ideas of who they would like to stop by for a special lesson or two.
Pauline hopes to see Kimberly in a debate class taught by both Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Mia wants Phoebe Waller-Bridge as her driving instructor (“I don’t actually know if schools have that, but American screams having their own driving instructor, especially at Essex”). Gracie hopes to get an SNL alum as a teacher and sees “Kristen Wiig playing a theater professor at Essex.” Amrit would love to see Bela go back to her comedy roots and work with Amy Schumer. (“One of the writers had written a mock script where I had bumped into Amy Schumer, and I’ve always remembered that.”) Meanwhile, Alyah says her pick is “Jenna Lyons teaching some sort of fashion design class. Love her!”
While the guest costars come and go, the core group remains solid throughout, both onscreen and off. As the characters started to build out their own relationships with each other in season 3, the lines began to blur between life and art. “I remember the scene where Taylor’s in the hospital from overdrinking. It was one of Taylor’s first pivotal moments in her storyline, and I felt akin as Bela and Amrit in showing up for Taylor/Mia. Whether it be this or the goodbye scene, so many situations in art mimic reality, so that was serendipitous,” Amrit said.
The character exploration leaves a lot to be learned, too. “We’re getting to know them even more and digging into their quirks and their idiosyncrasies,” Pauline added. “Just the way that we relate to each other this season is deeper because of the passage of time and that’s just such a blessing to be able to do that.”
“The more scenes you have, the more you learn who your character is, and every scene before informs how you act in the scene that you’re in,” Alyah said, noting that Whitney’s past storylines involving Dalton, Canaan, and now her future in the soccer team have all led to her character having “to deal with that at a certain point. She just can’t keep falling. She has to catch herself and take a beat and ask for help. But she’s young, and she has to learn that.”
For Gracie, joining the crew meant splitting time between music and acting while meshing all of the above in Kacey. “I love that I’m able to both act and sing in this show—it’s such a dream come true. My band Lawrence is a huge part of my life. It’s somewhat unusual for TV to be able to sing live. It’s was such a blending of world for me.”
Even so, the show does not hesitate to show the darker sides of the college experience when appropriate. With new characters and storylines, season 3 notably began to balance more of the serious side of becoming an adult with the humor that made fans fall in love with Sex Lives of College Girls in the first place.
“I think the beauty of comedy is that we can have a sense of humor about dark subjects. That’s why we look up to stand-up comedy so much—which I think is one of the hardest art forms,” Amrit said. “There’s the ability for these comedians—or in this case, all of us as a cast—to make people look at themselves, but with a sense of humor, as opposed to hating themselves, which often cancel culture or woke culture does. We can laugh at ourselves for being human and possibly change as a result.”
“It’s actually quite refreshing to see characters that aren’t completely well-rounded or this kind of pinnacle of perfect. It’s important for viewers that are watching and maybe going through similar things to feel seen in Taylor. If they find some relief through our characters, that important because just maybe we’ll give somebody a sign of relief,” Mia added.
“It’s a particular position to be in when you’re an actor, especially in something like the Mindy Kaling universe, where there are really specific rules and timing is really important and speed and constant pace,” Pauline said. “And it’s kind of finding how to tell these kinds of true stories through comedy and keep it grounded.”
Whether the plot is delightful or dire, the cast is in the dark about it until the table read. “There’ll be audible gasps or things because you’re discovering it in the moment,” Pauline added.
Along with Taylor’s sobriety journey, Bela spent season 3 trying to re-find herself after nearly blowing up every friendship in season 2. Kimberly proved herself against her richer male classmates. Whitney decided how much she’s willing to juggle being a sports star and high-level academic while still having a social life, which included a moment of “letting her have this moment of discovering her Blackness in real time and what that means to her,” Alyah said.
“It’s such a real version of what it means to exist in the world today as a young Black person. We’re not a monolith, obviously, but she has to act a certain way because of who her mother is and has her beliefs that she doesn’t quite know that she has. She’s having a separate experience here and you see her resist trying to have that until she finally realizes it’s inevitable for her. I felt like that’s the experience I had when I left home, too.”
Kacey discovered her boyfriend had been cheating on her and simultaneously fought against parental pressures from her mom specifically. “She’s going through a self-confidence journey. She comes from a world that values a very perfectionist version of beauty and she has to kind of unlearn that,” Gracie said.
And refreshingly? While audiences root for the characters and there is clear growth, none of them are perfect. “We see Kimberly continue to make mistakes, but they’re better mistakes,” Pauline said. “They’re smarter mistakes. We get to see her thriving in an academic environment that she feels comfortable in, which comes with the territory of being a sophomore in college and just feeling a little bit more at home.”
“I had that with this show and moving to the United States,” Mia added. “Coming from a world of my family and my friends and my life, I know who I am in that space. Coming to the U.S., not knowing anyone and being thrown in my amazing (but scary) job, I had to relearn who I actually was on my own. And that was really hard at first. It took some time.”
“We’re depicting the realest version of dealing with your own insecurities,” Gracie said. “Being in this kind of a show that has comedy and heart? It shows that things are not mutually exclusive.”
New episodes of season 3 of The Sex Lives of College Girls stream every Thursday on Max.
Videos and loops by Khadija Horton and Ying Chen.
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