‘He’s All That’: Addison Rae Once Shared Whether Music or Acting Is Harder for Her
Addison Rae Easterling rose to fame as a TikTok star. She is one of the most-followed people on the platform.
Easterling’s popularity has allowed her to work in her areas of entertainment. So far, she has done music and acting. Easterling once shared whether music or acting is more difficult for her.
Addison Rae is branching out from TikTok
Easterling became popular on TikTok thanks to her many dancing videos and collaborations with other stars on the platform.
In March 2021, Easterling ventured into music with the release of a dance-pop song called “Obsessed.” The song trended on YouTube when it first premiered and eventually landed at number 10 on Billboard’s US Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart.
Recently, Easterling also dipped her toes into acting with a starring role in the Netflix film He’s All That, which is a gender-swapped remake of the 1999 box office hit She’s All That. Easterling plays Padgett Sawyer, a teenager who decided to give one of her classmates a makeover.
Easterling has received criticism for straying away from social media. However, she is not letting the critics get to her.
“In this industry, when you come in and get labeled as one thing… people like to keep you there,” she told Elle. “Which is understandable, and I get it, but what people don’t realize is I’ve always wanted to do acting, I’ve always wanted to do music. I’ve always wanted to do all these other things that they didn’t really get to see or know, because I just started being known when I was 19 years old.”
She added, “People haven’t really seen the background, or the classes I used to take and things like that. So I try to tell myself, ‘You have to work that much harder to get people to take you seriously.’”
Addison Rae once shared whether music or acting is harder for her
As for whether music or acting is more difficult for Easterling, the star revealed that music is “a little bit harder” because it requires her to be more “vulnerable.”
“I would say it’s almost a little bit harder with music because I would say… I’m being very vulnerable,” she said on the Zach Sang Show in April 2021. “So that’s a little more difficult than almost playing a character, you know? You can play a character and that’s not you, but for me, being vulnerable in the studio and giving my thoughts and ideas, my concepts and my stories, and my experiences.”
She added, “I mean, it’s hard to think that, you know, you’re putting a lot of things on the line that you kind of believe yourself and running with it.”
How Addison Rae prepared for her role in ‘He’s All That’
In order to do her job as an actor well, Easterling also had to learn how to bring herself into her role of Padgett in He’s All That.
As she told Elle, she frequently attended acting classes.
“I was in acting classes probably three times a week, and doing personal coaching over Zoom as well as script analysis,” she said. “[I tried to find] things I could relate to in my life and how I felt in that moment. The biggest part was being able to connect emotions and figure out exactly how I wanted to read a line or be in a scene.”
Easterling shared that she often consulted her acting coach while filming the movie.
“Even the day of, [before doing] a scene, I would call my acting coach Nancy, and she’d be like, ‘All right, what are you channeling today? What exactly is the mood you’re getting into? How are you going to feel? How are you delivering that line, and how is your character going through this event?’” Easterling explained. “Then I’d have to get myself in that space. I would sit in my trailer for a few hours before I’d go and do the scene and read my lines and then make sure I was mentally in that space.”
