How The Sex Lives of College Girls Does ‘Girl-on-Girl Warfare’

How The Sex Lives of College Girls Does ‘Girl-on-Girl Warfare’
The show’s cast and creator discuss sophomore year’s shifting friend group.

By
Jason P. Frank,
a Vulture writer covering comedy, theater, and music

The cast of The Sex Lives of College Girls: Renika Williams, Alyah Chanelle Scott, and Ilia Isorelýs Paulino.
Photo: Sinna Nasseri

The Sex Lives of College Girls is breaking new ground. The third season of the show finds the girls back at move-in day, but it’s the beginning of their sophomore year, their second first day, and the site of their first real fight. Up until now, the girls’ conflict has been focused on external forces, like boys, grades, and clubs. But the second season left off with a cliffhanger: Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) was making out with Whitney’s (Alyah Chanelle Scott) ex-boyfriend. At Vulture Fest 2024, we screened the first episode of the show’s upcoming third season, which features Kimberly and Whitney coming to terms with the betrayal and how they can possibly move on while still leaving space to set up an arc for Bela (Amrit Kaur) and tenderly lead Leighton (Reneé Rapp) off into the distance. In the same episode, we meet one of several new characters, Taylor (Mia Rodgers), a queer, hard-ass, blonde first-year, though another new main cast member, Kacey (Gracie Lawrence), remains unseen.

After the screening, we sat down with SLOCG co-creator Justin Noble and members of his cast, including Ilia Isorelýs Paulino (Lila) and Renika Williams (Willow), to talk about the new season, Kimberly and Whitney’s conflict, and where the Rapp-less show goes from here. Chalamet called in from Paris to tell her side of the story, and Kaur Zoomed in from her new theater in Bushwick. “We don’t have a lot of taste for doing girl-on-girl warfare and having that be a prominent part of our storytelling, so we knew that we wanted to tell a story that was real,” Noble explained. “It’s not real if they never have any conflict whatsoever; that’s just Pollyanna.”

Watch the panel in full below, or read on for a transcript of the conversation.

So it’s the third season of the show, but for the girls, it’s their second year of college.
Justin Noble: Are you giving me math on a Saturday morning?

At this point, you’ve been through all the major milestones that happen in one year of college. How did you approach keeping the show fresh when you have a move-in day again?
J.N.: The thing that’s so fun about sophomore year is that in season one, these characters arrive on campus and they’re shell-shocked. In sophomore year, you come back and you’re like, “We are experts in college life.” And then life very swiftly is like, “No, you are not!”

We certainly haven’t seen everything that’s gone on in these characters’ lives. I’ve been wondering: What are their majors?
Ilia Isorelýs Paulino: That’s a great question! I think Lila is just, like, there. I think she passes all of her classes but strictly on jokes, you know what I mean?

Alyah Chanelle Scott: She’s undecided.

I don’t know; she could be an amazing business major based on the fact that she’s the full-on boss of a coffee shop.
I.I.P.: Right, right! I forgot. She does business!

Renika Williams: I think Willow is a communications major because that is the most basic major. I’m sorry if anybody is — you’re gonna do so well with it! But I think Willow is the type that won’t do the internships after, you know what I’m saying? You have to put in a little extra effort. I think Willow just always told her grandma she would go to college, so she went to college.

There’s going to be some reshuffling this season. Obviously, Reneé’s Leighton is no longer going to be part of the show. When you have these ensemble stories, typically every single character that you write plays a specific tonal role. I’m curious what it was like to navigate not having that tone at your disposal.
J.N.: It’s like every show is a soup with different ingredients in it, and that’s especially true of our show because the favorite scenes are where everyone’s sitting around in the common room together talking about some issue and everyone has a unique perspective on it and their lines couldn’t be delivered by any other character. So as you shift things up, that is a task to figure it out.

The fun thing is, college is just naturally a world that keeps expanding. I think about my first year in college and I probably had 10 close friends and I held onto them like literal stuffed animals. But as you get into your sophomore year, you’re walking through other doorways, joining groups, and your world gets bigger. So this year, as we decided to add two new voices into the show with Kacey and Taylor, we started talking about what those character traits could be. The first day we did it, the writers came up with 800 ideas for who these people could be, and we just figured out what was different from what we already have in the show.

There are remnants of some things that Leighton will have in common with Kacey this season or with Taylor. The same is true for the other characters. I think one of my tricks in terms of writing, especially for this show, where there’s usually a foursome or a fivesome, is to have a divided room on different issues. So if you actually were to break down the characters — and please don’t do this; it would be very boring for you — usually, two of them would agree on something and two of them would disagree on something. That allows for different dynamics to naturally flow. So we’ll have a lot of that with Kacey.

Alyah, what was that like for you: navigating that as an actor and as a character in a new formation?
A.C.S.: You haven’t seen it yet, but you get to see us say goodbye to her in real time on the show, and shooting that was very emotional but also at the same time very silly because she lives three minutes away from me. So it wasn’t like, “Bye. See you never!” It was like, “See you tonight!”

But also, I’ve been a friend of Gracie’s since I was in college, and she came to my college town to play a show. Knowing she was coming onto the show, I was trying to be very chill about it but not very chill about it. When you know new people are coming into an environment that’s established, I wanted to make sure they felt welcome, but I was maybe, perhaps, too eager to make them feel welcome. I was like, “Guys, what are you doing? What’s going on? You wanna hang out?” And they were like, “Okay, we get it. You want to be friends. That’s okay.” But I think we all had that energy of wanting to take care of them and usher them into the space. Because we all came at it with such an arms-wide-open approach, it really made the group dynamic solidify in a new, fun way that really made it feel like — it’s my favorite season so far.

Alyah and Pauline, this was a landmark season in a lot of ways because the first episode is the first time that a central rift is between the girls. There’s no one on the outside; it’s just between you guys. Starting with Pauline, I’m curious if it felt different to play a plot that centered around an inter-girl, inter-friend tension.
Pauline Chalamet: Yes, it did. It felt like it was playing something a little deeper than I think is normal on a season three. I know something that was really important for both Alyah and me was that this scene be about their friendship and not be about a guy because the rift that happens between them is representative of what can happen between friendships in college.

J.N.: When we were filming in the closet at the frat basement, we were filming the scene as it was scripted, and then I think both of you independently were coming over to me being like, “Something just feels a little off.” And we ended up pausing and actually rewrote it on the fly, and Alyah and Pauline were deciding their own lines. I was sitting there just tweaking them ever so slightly for TV. It made the scene so much better. The funny thing was, we shot the original version of the scene, like, I don’t know, 11 times because we were trying to figure out what’s slightly off. As soon as we got the new words, we filmed it two or three times for sound purposes, and then as soon as the editors saw it, they were like, “That’s the version!” TV is such a collaborative medium, but they knew their characters so well, they knew that they needed to make that tweak.

A.C.S.: I think people expected it to be this brawl between the two of us, which would have been fun, honestly — some stunt choreo. But for me, so much time has passed. It’s been a summer since the thing happened. Hurt kind of festers. If it was immediately afterwards, maybe there would be some sort of fight. But to see someone three months later and be like, “I’m gonna whoop your ass,” that’s crazy, you know?

I.I.P.: Is it?

A.C.S.: You have some time to process what’s happened! I think for Whitney the processing was like, Oh, wait, I think this is actually more about how close I thought we were, and if that was something you wanted, you would have come to me about it first. And you not doing that made me question how close you thought I was to you. Are we not girls? Do we not do that? So that was the root of the thing. And when we were doing the scene, I was like, “We have to talk about that thing because that’s the hurt that I feel in this moment.”

J.N.: As a show, it’s so abundantly clear for anyone who’s seen any episode of it — we don’t have a lot of taste for doing girl-on-girl warfare and having that be a prominent part of our storytelling, so we knew that we wanted to tell a story that was real. It’s not real if they never have any conflict whatsoever; that’s just Pollyanna.

Pauline, one thing that you’ve talked about before is that you were a bit surprised to find yourself in a comedy at all. You were like, “I’m a drama girl. I am not the storyteller at a table; I am the one who will cry about my emotions.” I’m curious if that changed at all this season.
P.C.: I’ve been saying, picking Kimberly up again is like putting on an old pair of really worn shoes, but you haven’t put them on in a while, so it’s a little funky at first. I still think I’m learning. I learn every day at work on this show, and what I really learn is the technicality of comedy. I used to think that you have to be just a “funny person” in life and those are the people who do comedy. But I’m learning that, actually, comedy is a very technical skill. I take a lot of enjoyment in reading the scripts and then, when I see what Kimberly is going through on an episode, being like, Okay, where are the beats in this scene? What is it that’s the comedy in this? When I can figure it out mathematically, then I’m not really focused on or worried about being funny.

Ilia and Amrit, you two play two of the horniest people alive. How do you make sure that feels grounded and real?
I.I.P.: Listen, I grew up in a very, very controlled situation. My daddy’s a pastor, and if you know, you know! It all stems from love, sure, but there is something that happens when you grow up in a pressure cooker of always feeling like not only do I have the eyes of my parents on me always, but everyone in the congregation is like, “That’s Paulino’s daughter.” It’s behavioral science that when I bloomed, I bloomed! And I think there’s nothing wrong with it, you know?

A.K.: Ilia and I are very similar in that way. We have very sheltered homes, so once we had the show, we were like, “It’s coming out!” I think all of us are horny, really. We are sexual human beings to varying degrees; we just gotta admit it.

Bela’s had a tumultuous year. Out of all of the characters, she’s the only one who tried to transfer and then failed. She has a 1.8 GPA. She’s completely altered her path moving forward by this episode; she doesn’t think that she’s gonna be a comedian anymore. Do you have dreams for her moving forward? Are you rooting for her to go a specific way?
A.K.: Absolutely! I’m selfish! I hope she finds her way back to comedy. We’ll see if she does. And I will say “thank you” to Bela because she’s made me realize how much I like comedy, and I’ve started doing stand-up and failing publicly. I’ve learned a lot from that kid.

Has doing stand-up affected how you perform as the character?
A.K.: Absolutely. But I think it’s the other way around. Bela’s someone who’s always testing out jokes and trying to see if she’s funny. When I’m playing Bela, I feel like I’m constantly doing that in my real life: testing out if I’m funny or not. And most of the time I’m not — just like Bela’s most of the time not! Stand-up is all about failing, and I can be better at failing. I opened up a theater with some of my most amazing colleagues, and we have a stand-up stage underground. It’s the biggest theater in Bushwick. Please come if you want to see me onstage!

And, Renika and Alyah, you both play soccer players. What is your relationship with jockdom? Do you feel connected to that in any way?
A.C.S.: It’s foreign to me. We have fun, though. It feels like half the time when we’re filming the soccer scenes, I’m like, “Five, six, seven, eight!” It becomes choreography to us, and that’s how we cope.

R.W.: Yeah, because the first day of soccer training, I cried.

A.C.S.: She did!

R.W.: We had to stop practice! I quit every sport I ever played growing up, and so the fact that J.N. hired me — it feels like an accomplishment. To do our own stunts? Like, did you guys see Alyah doing it?

A.C.S.: We rehearse the soccer sequences, and there’s camera movements and sequences and different plays. And for some reason, when we get on the day, everybody’s like, “Alyah looks so good! Can we just keep making her do it instead of the stunt double?” And I’m like, “Who? What? Huh?”

J.N.: There’s this amazing moment in episode eight of season one, and Whitney’s doing a penalty kick and it’s going to put them into the playoffs. We were filming overnight at Vassar; like, the sun was literally peeking over the trees, and we were like, “We have to finish before the sun comes up.” And Alyah was trying to get this penalty kick. And then she had this shocking drill ball into an upper corner. It was, like, the best kick we’ve ever seen. It was beyond professional. The reaction that’s in the show is, I think, Alyah’s genuine reaction of like, How the fuck did I do that???

What college milestones are you all excited to play moving forward?
P.C.: The first one that comes to mind is a study-abroad.

I.I.P.: I want to see Lila fall in love.

Who do you think she’d fall in love with?
I.I.P.: You know those people who are the same age range but they have the spirit of a 102-year-old — like, old-man energy? Someone who will let her perform and not care that she’s in the spotlight.

J.N.: Someone who can go toe to toe with Lila.

I.I.P.: No, no, sit down! Just watch! I will provide entertainment. Just like it, thank you.

A.C.S.: I mean, graduation? Like, if we could be so lucky to get that far.

J.N.: We’re on pace to hit that in season 45!

A.C.S.: There’s also that thing that happens in college where you come back one year and you just have a glow-up and your whole look is different and your hairstyle is different. I want that to happen. Like, she comes back with a wolf cut and is like, “I go by Rex now!” you know what I mean?

R.W.: I would like Willow to run for student-body president.

A.K.: SNL. I think that’s obvious. Get SNL in there.

A.C.S.: Musical episode!

J.N.: It’s so weird how many musical people are in this cast of television. It’s almost every single one of them. Someone even the other day — oh, Nabeel! Nobody knows who Nabeel Muscatwalla is in the show yet, but he plays a character named Arvind. I’m giving you all the spoilers. But he put up a video singing, and I was walking my dog the other night being like, Him too? I mean, look, I love that episode of Buffy!

R.W.: It needs to be, like, Into the Woods.

I.I.P.: No, Grease.

A.C.S.: Little Shop!

J.N.: Ilia has a gun to Alyah’s back, going “say Grease!”

I’m just a big gay musical theater person myself. But it’s not just Glicked weekend; it’s also the weekend our show comes out. I’m trying to figure out what that is: The Sex Glicked Lives of College Warrior Witches? Be sure to stay home and watch our movie too!

The Sex Lives of College Girls Does ‘Girl-on-Girl Warfare’