Charli XCX Featurette On Vanity Fair Magazine

2025-10-14T23:03:10Z

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Charli is freshly showered, twisting her damp waves until a tumbleweed of hair falls to the ground and rolls across the patio. She is freckled (who knew Charli xcx had freckles?) and makeup-free. (She is also bra-free, though that we have seen before.) Her ubiquitous Balenciaga and Mugler bags are elsewhere—she is wearing Bottega Veneta flats and a stomach-covering vintage T-shirt featuring three buxom women drawn by fetish artist Eric Stanton, as well as jeans by Guess, which are impossible to look at without triggering the lyrics of Charli’s song of the same name featuring Billie Eilish.

Early hits like “Boom Clap” and “I Love It” were huge, but Charli wasn’t particularly. As she told Kareem Rahma on his interview series SubwayTakes last year before Brat came out, “Some artists have a song, but a song isn’t enough.” Charli says many friends have asked her, “You are in your 30s now—do you feel like you’re more equipped to handle this? What do you think would’ve happened if this had happened when you were 18?” But, Charli says, it kind of did happen—she was almost a plus-one to the world-famous songs she had created, which allowed her to travel and perform internationally and to engage with a kind of half version of what was to come. She was featured in publications like The Guardian and Rolling Stone, but the framing tended to focus on Charli’s permanent status in the waiting room of A-list-hood, where she was left to toil in niche brilliance. “I dipped my toe in, but I wasn’t fully in,” she says. “I think having that experience probably equipped me well for this happening.”

So now that brat is over…. Charli stops me as I put that to her. “I don’t really get to decide when it’s over or not,” she says. “I think that’s up to the world.” It will eventually exist “as a relic.” “I don’t think people will forget it,” she says. On the other hand, “It’s not ****ing New Wave.”

“The end will be interesting,” Charli says. “Because then I have to look at myself in a different way and be stripped of the thing that everyone identified me with.” Whatever this post-brat version of Charli xcx is, she says, “I won’t be staring into the abyss wondering what I’m gonna do.”

A New York magazine writer tried to get Charli to discuss whether “Sympathy Is a Knife” is about Taylor Swift, as was a common interpretation of lyrics that mentioned dreading seeing someone backstage at her boyfriend’s show. (In 2023, Swift dated Daniel’s 1975 bandmate Matty Healy, who would subsequently crowd-surf at Charli and Daniel’s Italian wedding redux.)

In October, Swift released The Life of a Showgirl, featuring “Actually Romantic,” which appeared to misinterpret Charli's song about self-doubt as a diss track, with lyrics like, “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” and, "Wrote me a song sayin' it makes you sick to see my face." Swift has not confirmed who “Actually Romantic” is about, beyond saying it's someone who had a “one-sided, adversarial relationship with” her. (If you write an adversarial track about someone, is the relationship really one-sided?) Pretty much everyone immediately believed the song was about Charli; Swifties swarmed.

Since the Showgirl drop, Charli hasn’t exactly been in witness protection, popping up on the Saturday Night Live stage to support musical guest Role Model, anointing him with her signature sunglasses. The saga continues in the comments section, but so far Charli has avoided engaging directly, including in the pages of Vanity Fair. She declined to comment on the situation.

The obvious follow-up to Brat would have been to make more music, as Charli had done after her previous five studio albums—especially now that there was the option that, as she says, “You could just do more of that thing because now that’s what people see you as. You’ve solidified this brand that people seem to understand and want to digest very easily.” That was not particularly inspiring to Charli. And also, as she’d word-vomited to Zamiri, she’d basically gotten everything she wanted.

“Did I need everyone’s validation to feel that way?” Charli asks of her secondhand self-acceptance. “I guess I probably did, and that’s probably why I am an artist. But I think once I had that experience, that’s reward enough for me to feel satisfied in that area for a while.” Twenty minutes later, her zen has evaporated somewhat. “I don’t think one day I’m gonna wake up and be like, ‘I feel confident, and I’m done with feeling anything else other than confidence,’ ” Charli says. “Some days I feel totally destroyed and completely in the depths of misery. But I also need the high contrast to be able to create anything. If I was happy all the time, I probably wouldn’t be making art.”

While Charli says she doesn’t know if or when she’ll release another album, she’s already been working on more music, albeit for a fictional character. She and Jack Antonoff wrote songs for Mother Mary, the David Lowery film in which Anne Hathaway plays a famous musician. “We were making music that I don’t think I would ever make for my artist project”—songs for Charli xcx—“but still music that I truly love.”

In addition to contributing music for Hathaway’s character, Charli told her (at her request) what being a pop star is like. She was “so generous sharing her experiences,” Hathaway says. “It was like chatting with a girlfriend.”

“She was the opposite of aloof,” Hathaway says. “I was delighted at how friendly and real she was. Her talent is one that’s easily underappreciated because the end result feels so fun and achievable, but it’s actually a stunningly rare feat.”

https://www.vaniyfair.com/hollywood/story/charli-xcx-interview?srsltid=AfmBOorDyGJp7ssMHelXM6ZRB5hCqVye4EbD3AhSEsynOMlJs0jjqdgs