‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’ Boss Unpacks Season 3 Changes: Reneé Rapp’s Exit and 2 New Stars

As “The Sex Lives of College Girls” reunites the Max show’s core four girls for their sophomore year, Season 3 saw some shake-ups to the cast, as Reneé Rapp departed while a couple of fresh faces arrived at Essex.

After news broke that Reneé Rapp, whose role as Leighton Murray marked the pop star’s TV debut, would be stepping down as a series regular, “a joyful send-off that was the only thing in the cards” for showrunner Justin Noble, who co-created the series with Mindy Kaling. “Leighton Murray — all she does is win … Leighton is too aware of herself at this point to do anything else that wouldn’t serve her,” Noble said of Leighton’s exit, which is wrapped up in the second episode of the season.

“Leighton … made good on the challenge of what college is sooner than the rest of them … this is a period of time where you figure out what’s next for you, and she knows that like a month into sophomore year,” Noble told TheWrap. “She makes this sweet choice that is not all roses, where she has to say goodbye to people she loves, but she knows it’s the only thing she can do for her own best future. It just felt very fitting and correct for the character to us.”

While saying goodbye to Leighton is bittersweet — especially for Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), Bela (Amrit Kaur) and Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) — her exit provided an opportunity for Noble and his writing staff to go back to the drawing board to add not one, but two new main characters, found in Mia Rodgers and Gracie Lawrence.

“At the end of the day, the show is called ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls,’ and there’s a lot of different types of college girls that can have meaningful and funny and impactful stories on TV,” Noble said. “We truly had a wall covered with different ideas of them, and we pursued a couple and we’re really in love with who we’ve got.”

Below, Noble unpacks how the new girls impact expand storylines for the Max series, unpacks Leighton’s transformation for her Season 3 and reveals how the team tackled coming back from Whitney and Kimberly’s cold war.

TheWrap: It’s been quite a journey to get to Season 3 with the strike. How did the time off impact writing for Season 3? 

Noble: We had just started staffing Season 3, and then we saw that a strike was probably coming, so it was a little bit of play time, just idea generation before the strike. But it was nice after the strike to come back knowing exactly how we would proceed at that point. We knew we would write two episodes with Leighton and then write her off, so that gave us new assignments moving forward.

When we see Leighton again, she has a lot of Reneé’s styling, which fans picked up on in the trailer for the season. Can you walk us through that transformation?

That was just happenstance, frankly. I think that maybe Leighton on the script and Reneé in real life were on similar trajectories there. The real creative intent was she was written to be a little less femme on the script this season, and I think Reneé was just naturally also doing that in her life. That’s something that started with honestly meeting Alicia in Season 1 — Leighton was so lipstick, quite literally having a fight with Alicia about a Yves Saint Laurent bag in the background — and I think Alicia started to rub off on her in different ways, very much based off people in my own life and lives of the people in the writers’ room. She definitely was meant to present that way … it was definitely scripted.

As Leighton leaves, we get not one, but two new girls. How did their characters come about and how do they shake up group dynamics?

It’s only naturally fitting that we then meet someone who’s in the year underneath them. The fun pairing there, of course, is putting her with Bela, who’s like the thirstiest character in television history, and then giving her someone who she absolutely should have high status over. But instead, it’s Taylor, who has higher status than Bela, and has a funny British wit that will never give Bela an inch.

With Kacey’s character, her card started with some version of saying, “girly girl,” because we were talking about what hasn’t been on the show … and then I think one of the writers was like, “I don’t know that Kimberly would really spark to a girly girl. She might actually kind of look down on that.” And I was like, “That’s interesting, because girly girl isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” Whitney would kind of have the same reaction as Kimberly, so this started to have implied dynamics … and then we just fleshed her out more and more, talking about, like, how she would have become the way that she is and why she would come to the school, and she just started to feel like a real person.

I loved seeing that Taylor is also queer. Why was it important for you to include a queer character moving forward?

I just have a gigantic, big queer agenda — I don’t even hide it at this point. I wanted Taylor to be the inverse of what Leighton was — Leighton came in, obviously closeted, thinking she was something else in college and wanting to present as such, even though we knew in the dark, in like the shadows, she was slipping away to a casino and sleeping with a hot older woman. But [for] Taylor … we talked about this character who’s lived a lot of life, surprisingly, for 18 years old. I think she grew up very quickly in London. I think she started knowing exactly who she was at a very young age. She didn’t deny it at all. She wouldn’t dare to, but we learned she still has plenty of room to grow in some other areas.

We left off with Whitney and Kimberly at odds over Canaan and Bela putting in a request to transfer. How did you tackle coming back with the girls somewhat at odds over their future at Essex?

We definitely chose a lot of chaos. I do think that it was naturally fitting that the end of their first year maybe wasn’t the best, especially for Bela, because she, frankly, had earned it — Bela had made a ton of selfish choices and we just need to see her own them. We like it when a character can look themselves in the mirror and say, “I’ve made a bunch of mistakes and I want to do better.” The fun part is, this is Bela, so she’s gonna try to be better in a new way, but she’s definitely not ready to succeed right out of the big right out of the gate.

With Kimberly and Whitney, we’re not super invested in girl-on-girl warfare. However, we do want to be true to what dynamics are in suites like this, and people are going to have fights. It would be so unrealistic if they never had any conflict whatsoever, but our show is certainly not interested in a prolonged feud between the two of them. I don’t think people would like it if we did — it wouldn’t feel real to me. These people feel like two people who are good friends, who want to be good friends, and will get past it, and then 15 years from now, Whitney will mention it in like Kimberly’s wedding toast, much to Kimberly’s chagrin.

What are you excited for viewers to see this season?

I’m really excited for them to see Kasey’s trajectory over the course of the season — there’s a lot of impactful lessons that her character can bring to an audience, especially an audience of young women. There’s just a bunch of fun set pieces, a bunch of fun parties, bunch of fun new relationships to follow through. This season feels great to me, because I think there’s more comedy than there was in Season 2.

Have you already started thinking about a potential Season 4?

I definitely have thoughts on where they’ll go in Season 4. I try not to go too far ahead, just because I really and truly embrace the collaborative side of this and our writers are incredible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New episodes of Season 4 drop every Thursday at 9:00 p.m. ET on Max.

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