Inside the Megan Thee Stallion Documentary

Megan Thee Stallion performs in New York City in September 2024. Credit - Bryan Bedder--Getty Images for Athlos

In songs and music videos, Megan The Stallion is authoritative, audacious, unbothered, self-possessed to the point of arrogance. But this larger-than-life persona masks a deep well of trauma: For the past few years, the rapper, born Megan Pete, has struggled with grief, PTSD, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

This fraught duality is the driving force behind Nneka Onuorah’s new documentary, Megan: In Her Words, which premieres on Oct. 31 on Prime Video. Starting in 2022, Onuorah followed Pete with a camera as she performed on some of the world’s biggest stages and racked up billions of streams—while grieving the death of her mother and grappling with the aftermath of being shot by the rapper Tory Lanez.

In an interview, Onuorah says one of her main goals in making the film was to reveal the fraught humanity behind Pete’s superhero-like facade. “This film is Megan's open book into her heart during one of the hardest times of her life,” she says. “It highlights how grief and depression can take a toll on your life and your experiences. There’s so much grief in the world right now, which is why I feel like this story is so relatable.”

Like many people, Onuorah started paying full attention to Megan Thee Stallion when her song “Savage” took social media by storm in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic. In that song, Pete celebrates herself and the many facets of her personality—“classy, bougie, ratchet”—with wit and bombast. The song’s remix, featuring a verse by one of Pete’s idols Beyoncé, soon skyrocketed to the top of the Billboard charts. “WAP,” an uproariously profane collaboration with Cardi B, claimed the top spot a couple months later.

But while Pete provided a badly-needed source of joy during the pandemic, few realized how deeply she herself was grieving. Her mother Holly Thomas, who served as her foremost role model, confidante, and motivator, had died the previous year from a brain tumor. Pete later told Onuorah that she turned to substances, partying, and work to distract herself: “I keep getting lit, thinking I’m going to get through this pain.”

To make matters far worse, Pete was shot in the foot by the rapper Tory Lanez after a heated argument in July 2020. The pair had become friends and were also romantically involved; alcohol played a central role in their encounters, Pete told Onuorah. That night, tempers flared and Lanez shot at her five times. Lanez recorded an apologetic phone call to Pete’s friend that night from jail, but later denied shooting her. In the months after, the dispute spilled onto social media and then into court—with Lanez charged with three felonies, including discharging a firearm with gross negligence—and many people took his side, accusing Pete of lying about what had happened.

It was in this fragile state, in early 2022, when Onuorah started filming Pete for a documentary. (Onuorah had previously directed The Legend of the Underground, about the Nigerian LGBTQ community, and Lizzo’s Watch Out For the Big Grrrls, on Prime Video.) She knew that grief would be a major theme of the documentary from very early on: “I could tell her spirit felt a little broken,” she says. “That's why I wanted to be there for her to create a safe space through this process.”

There have been many high-profile music documentaries in the last few years, often created with the artist’s label’s involvement (including films about Billie Eilish and Blackpink). (Executives from Roc Nation, which manages Pete, served as executive producers on the documentary, alongside TIME Studios.) But Onuorah wanted her film to hearken back to an earlier era of music documentaries, like 1991’s Madonna: Truth or Dare: to create a portrait that felt “raw, honest, and not contrived or sensationalized,” she says.

Onuorah followed Pete around the world, to Tokyo, Switzerland, Paris, and back home to Houston, where they visited Pete’s mother’s grave. While Pete hired film crews in many of those places, she also filmed Pete herself, one-on-one, in order to increase trust and intimacy between filmmaker and subject. In those sessions, Pete told Onuorah about how she wielded Megan Thee Stallion as a “mask” to hide from her demons; how she suffered from paralyzing nightmares, and constantly felt isolated. At one point, at the height of her depression, Pete called 911 because she struggled to breathe. “I didn’t feel like my life had value,” she says.

Megan: In Her Words eschews the type of talking-head interviews that fill many other documentaries. (Notable missing voices include Pardison Fontaine, Pete’s romantic partner around the time period of filming, and close musical collaborators like Cardi B and Glorilla.) “I don't feel like that's a way to really get to understand and know a person, because that's from other peoples’ perspective,” Onuorah says. “I really want to observe and use a vérité approach.”

The film doesn’t provide much new information about the night of Pete’s shooting, such as the exact dispute between her and Lanez, or the role that Pete’s friend and assistant Kelsey Harris, who was with them, played in the conflict. (Harris pleaded the fifth on the stand; Lanez was found guilty of three felonies in August, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.) The film, however, does show Pete’s raw emotion and relief upon learning of Lanez’ conviction.

This year, Pete scored a No. 1 single, “HISS,” and a No. 3 album, MEGAN; she sold out Madison Square Garden and hosted the MTV VMAs. In October, she released another album entitled Act II. In an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Pete opened up about the process of filming the documentary and her struggles with being surrounded by film crews. “A lot of the footage is cell phone footage, because I refused to film in front of cameras,” she said.

Onuorah says that her respect for Pete only increased while watching her endure immense hardships in the spotlight. “Most of us say we're strong, but we've never had millions of people every day lying on us, saying negative things about us,” she says. “I commend Megan for her resilience throughout this process to still come out on top. She truly is the definition of strength to me.”

Contact us at letters@time.com.