How A Star of ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’ Took Broadway and Hollywood by Storm

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Alyah Chanelle Scott talks about going from struggling young actor to Tony-winning producer, her friendship with Dylan Mulvaney, big changes for her SLCG character Whitney, and more

During Alyah Chanelle Scott’s first trip to Los Angeles in 2020, she was feeling lost in her fledgling career. Straight out of college, she’d been cast in the national tour of The Book of Mormon, the musical comedy from South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker about Mormon missionaries preaching to a far-flung Ugandan village, playing an African convert named Nabulungi. The job meant eight shows a week, Tuesday through Sunday, and a day off on Monday that offered just enough time for the cast to catch a flight to a brand new city. It was physically grueling and emotionally draining.

“I was 21 and broke and I tried to quiet all those doubts I had about what I was putting myself through, or what I was representing,” Scott says. “I’m that girl that, every time I walk onstage, [a Mormon elder] calls me a different name and the audience bursts out laughing. The joke is that these white guys going to Uganda [are] in the wrong and we’re laughing at them. But the reality is that some audiences just think it’s funny to see a Black girl with no shoes on get called Neutrogena.”

So, in search of comfort and inspiration that day in L.A., she grabbed her friend and Book of Mormon co-star Dylan Mulvaney and hopped on a bus tour of famous people’s homes. “I don’t even know if they were their real houses. It was like, ‘Tyler Perry lives there,’” she jokes, pantomiming their tour guide pointing at an indistinct row of tall hedges. “I was like, ‘This feels so invasive, but also I’m obsessed with it.’ It was just very dreamy. It all felt so outside of ourselves.”

Scott had already accomplished more than most in a cutthroat and fickle industry. But what she wanted was artistic fulfillment — not only to get paid for her work but to feel proud of it, too. What Scott couldn’t know as she and Mulvaney rolled past stately mansions in Beverly Hills with stars in their eyes was that, in just a few short years, their only work woes would be having too much of it. Today, Scott, at just 27, is a two-time Tony-winning producer (for two revivals, the Ben Platt-led musical Parade and the play Appropriate, starring Sarah Paulson) and stars as Whitney Chase in Mindy Kaling’s ensemble comedy The Sex Lives of College Girls, which has just returned to Max for Season Three.

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“In the past, I felt scared of being perceived in any real way,” Scott says. “I was like, ‘Oh, nobody look at my face!’ I’ve grown up so much in the last two years. It’s the most comfortable and confident I’ve ever felt.”

On an upsettingly warm Wednesday in October, I head to the theater Mecca of Times Square, ablaze with flashing ads and massive billboards touting the latest plays and musicals, to meet Scott at Runyonland Productions, the company she runs alongside Thomas Laub, a fellow graduate of the University of Michigan’s theater program. Together, the pair are partially responsible for some of the splashiest new works on Broadway in the past five years, like A Doll’s House, David Bryne’s American Utopia, Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, and the 2023 revival of The Wiz. They also produced her friend Mulvaney’s 365 Days of Girlhood performance, a live variety show at the Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room celebrating the trans TikToker’s first year of, as Mulvaney put it, “being a girl.” The show was not just a coming-out party for her friend but a fundraiser for The Trevor Project, a mental-health nonprofit geared toward LGBTQ youth, streamed to 20,000 fans.

Over the four years Scott has spent building this impressive resume as a major creative force behind the scenes, her career has been taking off in front of the camera on Sex Lives.

“When the teaser came out a week ago, I was shocked about how many people remembered we exist,” she jokes as we sit in her office, decorated with bright red chairs and black votive candles. “It’s so exciting. It’s actually my favorite season of the show we’ve done so far. I auditioned when I was 22. You change so much in your twenties that to witness each of us go through these periods of growth and change has really mirrored the show in a way.”

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SET ON THE VERMONT campus of the fictional Essex College, The Sex Lives of College Girls follows the educational, work, and romantic misadventures of four mismatched roommates. Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) is an Arizona scholarship kid with no social skills to speak of; Bela (Amrit Kaur) is a sex-hungry newbie desperate to join the ranks of famous comedians; Leighton (Reneé Rapp) is a closeted lesbian who is rich, popular, and horrified that she might be excellent at mathematics; and Whitney is the daughter of a famous senator, just trying to get through her first year of college without someone posting everything she does online. It’s a mismatched crew, one first strung together by random assignment. But by the end of the first season, the four have become inseparable — and the series manages to offer a fresh take on college-era misadventures and female friendships.

“I think it [resonates] because of the experience of seeing four girls who come from vastly different places being forced into a space and having to figure out how to coexist,” Scott says.

There is also that matter of the sex. While the title might suggest something very risqué (Scott says her mom was “a little hesitant” when she first booked the role: “Obviously, you hear ‘sex’ and ‘HBO’ and your mind goes, like, ‘My tits are gonna be out’”), the series is more about the weird and uncomfortable encounters the girls have, how they talk about them with each other, and what they learn from them. They debate the pros and cons of sleeping with short kings, for example, or the proper etiquette for hooking up in a dorm room you share with three other people.

“Watching them have awkward sexual moments was helpful, because I think that isn’t something that we are given permission to see a lot,” Scott says. “Sex on TV is [often] super-stylized, Euphoria-esque, so hot and steamy and sexy and great. But sometimes in real life, you feel like ‘Am I doing it wrong? Am I fucking up the way I’m approaching sex?’ Seeing these girls figure out sex for the first time and do it in a way that is a little awkward is just so funny. It’s refreshing for a lot of people to see, for us to get to represent that side of young sexuality.”

Whitney certainly has her share of missteps, like her foolish decision in Season One to have a months-long affair with her assistant soccer coach. But as the series has progressed, Whitney has grown from an outburst-prone know-it-all into a self-assured scholar who has started to approach all aspects of life with a bit more gentleness, and now has a possible genuine shot at long-term love. (Don’t worry, there are still plenty of early-morning walks of shame — it’s called range.) The new season also sees Whitney coming to terms with her relationship with her Blackness and what it could mean for her potential career. For Scott, it’s been a storyline she’s been desperate to investigate.

“It’s a conversation that’s had about you no matter what you do as a Black actor,” Scott says. “In a show like this, it meant a lot to me to handle with care and be true to [Whitney’s] experiences. How does she perceive her own Blackness, or how does she not, going to a PWI [Private White Institution]? Is that something she’s been thinking of, or is she retroactively learning in real time what it means to exist as a Black girl in the world? Which is what I feel like happened to me when I went to college.”

A NATIVE TEXAN, Scott is the second-youngest of four children born to an aerospace engineer mother and Air Force serviceman turned businessman father. As a kid, she dreamed of being a performer. “That’s the fate of a middle child,” she says. “My family says that I came out of the womb an attention whore.” She sang and danced (on a hip-hop team that also included Normani), but didn’t connect those loves to musical theater until she was in high school, where she eventually starred as Belle in Beauty and the Beast her senior year. Still, when she was accepted to Michigan’s theater program — often referred to as the Harvard of theater programs — convincing her parents to let her go was another feat entirely. “To them, it was like, ‘We set you up to be able to go to school, get your degree, and have a life we couldn’t have, so why would you choose to struggle?’” Scott says. “In their minds, I was choosing to live a life of auditioning and being unemployed.”

They eventually agreed, and Scott flew to Michigan, where she was immediately humbled — a fish in a pond that had just gotten a whole lot bigger. It took time for Scott to convince herself she hadn’t made a mistake, and to figure out where her talents lay. She credits a lot of her success to a much-needed pep talk from her friend, the late Broadway star Gavin Creel. Her sophomore year, Scott became close friends with Creel, who was at Michigan developing a one-night-only project. Scott had spent the previous summer doubling up gigs at a pizza shop and a wedding catering company to make cash, almost certain she would be dropping out of school and moving home in the fall. She returned for auditions, still unconvinced she was on the right path, but it was Creel’s advice —“get your shit together”— that kept her enrolled and eventually got her the Mormon gig. A Tony-winning Broadway vet, Creel died from sarcoma in September at the age of 48, a death that shattered New York’s theater community. But when Scott speaks about him, there’s a constant smile on her face.

“Weirdly, the amount of joy I felt seeing how everyone has celebrated him completely surpasses the grief,” she says, eyes watering. “We all should strive to exist in the world the way Gavin did. To see his legacy in life be so full and positive at such a young age has only made me feel like I want to be in that world. It’s mind-blowing and inspiring and equally soul-crushing. But also, Gavin will always be here. He will always be so present and crucial to what it means to work in theater.”

AFTER ‘SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS’ Season Two ended a massive cliffhanger — with a revelation of feelings that not only challenged existing relationship statuses but the girls’ friendships — the SAG-AFTRA strike hit Hollywood, severely delaying the production of Season Three. It was during that break that Scott was able to more deeply explore her aspirations behind the camera, as well as get comfortable with her own growing celebrity. As more and more viewers caught up on the show, Scott’s onscreen work meant she was being recognized more off-screen. She credits her boyfriend, creator and red-carpet personality Reece Feldman, with showing her how to handle that new reality.

“I used to have so much crippling anxiety around people coming up to talk to me. And seeing Reece navigate it and have real conversations and be so open and normal, it’s reshaped the way I interact with people,” she says. “Now, I’m like, ‘Who are you? What’s your journey? Should we go get coffee?’ Like, the stakes and the mental games I put on myself to impress them, none of that is real. You can just say hi.”

While the return of The Sex Lives of College Girls is a welcome relief to Scott, there are plenty of big changes afoot for her and her co-stars. Chalamet just welcomed her first child. Kaur has led a major Canadian coming-of-age feature (The Queen of My Dreams). And Rapp has gone from series regular to a pop sensation so successful she’s had to step down from the series full time. As for Scott, she’s in production on more stage and screen projects than she can legally tell me about. But when I ask Scott about the work she’s most proud of so far, she mentions Mulvaney’s live 365 Days of Girlhood show without hesitation. Coming from a star of a show built around female friendships, it makes sense.