Here’s How ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’ Said Goodbye to Reneé Rapp

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[This story contains spoilers from The Sex Lives of College Girls season 3, episode 2, “Lila by Lila.”]

The OG girl group in The Sex Lives of College Girls has officially lost a member.

Bela (Amrit Kaur), Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) and Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) said their goodbyes to Leighton (Reneé Rapp) in the second episode of the Max show’s third season, which aired Thursday. While fans always knew Rapp would be exiting the series this season, they just didn’t know exactly when or why — until now.

The second episode sees Leighton make the difficult decision to transfer from Essex College to MIT. While her girlfriend, Alicia (Midori Francis), is also in Boston, Leighton is ultimately transferring because of MIT’s math program, which will help her with her future career in finance.

“I don’t wanna go,” Rapp tells her friends at one point. “I can’t imagine not having you guys with me. It is terrifying. But I think this is what I have to do if I care about my future.”

But before Leighton officially hits the road with her father, she spends one final night partying at Essex with her besties, which includes a pregame in their old college dorm suite.

Co-showrunner Justin Noble also previously spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about how they decided on Rapp’s farewell storyline: “We kind of landed on this pretty quickly. I mean, when you start to think about ways that college students leave, you’re pretty limited. It’s not like Reneé’s character was gonna go on a hike, and then Kimberly’s like, ‘You mean the rocky, dangerous hike near the cliff?’ And then, she falls off or something. Really, the only thing that could happen was that she would transfer to a different school.”

“But as we started talking about it, Mindy and I were chatting, we’re like, ‘This is Leighton Murray we’re talking about. The only thing Leighton Murray does is win,’” she continued. “So there’s no world where she would leave other than to take a massive step towards what would be her best, most powerful life moving forward.”

News broke over the summer of 2023 that Rapp, who has gone on to launch a hit music career, would be leaving the series during its third season. At the time, THR reported that she would appear in a few episodes as a recurring guest star, not a series regular, to set up Leighton leaving Essex.

Leighton discovered her math aptitude in Sex Lives of College Girls‘ first season, being told by a professor that she belongs in a more advanced class, feedback that she also turns into a way to get some verbal revenge against past friends who didn’t want to room with her.

When asked about her exit from the show in a February THR cover story, Rapp said the decision to leave “was hard for so many reasons” and recalled the difficult experience of coming to terms with her sexuality in her personal life as her character was doing so in the series.

“On TikTok, [I watched] this scene in season one, where I come out to another character as a lesbian, and I’m crying, sobbing,” she told THR. “And I hadn’t seen that scene in years. It is so interesting that at the time I wasn’t even aware that what I was experiencing in my own personal life was actually exactly what I was doing onscreen. I was in a relationship with a man, incredibly confused, unsure of myself, feeling so insecure in my acting. And I watched the scene the other day, and I was like, ‘Wow, I feel so lucky to have that.’ That’s something I would show my kids. So when I watched it back, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s hard to leave that.’”

Of that confusing time, she added, “I would go home, and I would call my friends, and I’d be like, ‘I think I’m a lesbian, but I really love my boyfriend. I would want to be with him, but I see him more as a friend.’ So not only was I doing that on the show, publicly, in a big way to so many people, and my family, who had no idea that I was gay, I was also going through it personally.”

Rapp has said she was thrilled to audition for the role, previously saying in a 2023 appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, before news of her Sex Lives departure broke, that she’d never been asked to audition for a queer character.

Still, she recalled having a “terrible” time filming the first season.

“I was just in a panic constantly,” she said. “And I wasn’t [straight], but I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing at me or me laughing at myself that I hated first year of filming.”

And she said she was “beating [herself] up so much.”

“I wanted so badly to do a good job,” she said. “I wanted to play the role in the way that if I saw it as a kid it would feel good to me. I also wanted to do a good job so bad that I was so nervous all the time. It was so much the first season.”

The Sex Lives of College Girls drops new episodes on Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Max.

Hilary Lewis contributed to this report.