Olivia Rodrigo Has an Idea for ‘Barbie’ Director Greta Gerwig
“Peace over pleasure,” Olivia Rodrigo told me one night in Los Angeles while serving herself a steamy, heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs. “That’s my saying.” Getting to hear casual truth-bombs like this is part of the joy that comes from spending time with the wisest 20-year-old in pop, and for our October cover story, we spent quite a lot of it.
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Naturally, a lot of delightful randomness landed on the cutting-room floor. Rodrigo talked about how, when she was a newborn, her parents would put her on the laundry-room dryer to help her fall asleep, and revealed that producer Dan Nigro’s baby makes a cameo on the Guts track “Teenage Dream.” She thinks 8:30 a.m. is the perfect time to wake up; she’s kind of, maybe, a little, terrified of the New York City subway. And that wasn’t all. Here are some of the funniest, smartest, most surprising things she said that didn’t make it into the cover story. (To hear our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast on Rodrigo’s Guts and the reporting of our story, listen here at the podcast provider of your choice, check out Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)
She’s planning on getting a new tattoo.
Rodrigo already has an outline of a heart on her pinky finger, matching one that her friend Iris Apatow has. But it’s already faded, so she’s planning out some new ink. This time, she wants to get a matching design with her best friend and Bizaardvark co-star Madison Hu. She’s envisioning one of them will get a square, while the other gets its negative, but she has some reservations. “I’m planning,” she says. “But I’ll probably chicken out.”
She’s been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell.
When Rodrigo and Hu recently vacationed in Hawaii, they played Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” over and over. “I mostly just started getting into her this year,” she says, noting that they met at the 2022 Grammys: “I couldn’t even process it. She was like, ‘You have a pretty dress on.’ I was like, dead.”
Her biggest fear? Birds.
Rodrigo is not a fan of feathered vertebrates, and not just because of Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller. “Birds are so foreign to us — there’s not one body part that looks like ours,” she says. “Everyone’s all afraid about aliens and shit. They’re like, ‘What are the aliens going to look like?’ I’m like, ‘We have birds on our planet, and we’re not scared of them. We’re fine!’” She even has jokes about the Birds Aren’t Real conspiracy theory: “Everyone’s like, ‘Have you ever seen a pigeon’s nest? Have you ever seen a pigeon lay an egg?’ And me at 18 years old, I’m like, ‘Wow. I’ve never seen a pigeon’s nest!’”
She calls Michelle Zauner and Karen O “the coolest girls in the music industry.”
At the mention of Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians interview with the frontwomen of Japanese Breakfast and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rodrigo expressed immense adoration. She cited Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart as one of her favorites. “That book fucking destroyed me,” she says. “It’s fantastic.” Meanwhile, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Y Control” is one of her favorite music videos — right next to Foo Fighter’s “Learn to Fly”.
She briefly took HIIT classes.
Before Rodrigo landed on pilates, her workout of choice, she dabbled in high-intensity interval training (HIIT). “I had a brief moment where I did that a lot,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, I’m getting runner’s high for the first time in my life!’ It was so fun. But then after, I’d just be so exhausted after doing an hour class. Sometimes I’d have to go home and take a nap to recover from my workouts because it was so intense. I’m 20 years old, in good health, and I was going three times a week, and my knees and back would start hurting so bad. I’m like, ‘I’m breaking down. This probably isn’t for me.’”
Her death row meal is not what you’d expect.
Rodrigo’s main choice, if she had to choose a final meal, would be a turkey sub, but she also loves chicken, rice, and broccoli. “I’m so boring and stuck in my ways,” she says. “The other day I was at the airport and I had chicken tenders and apple juice. I’m like, ‘This is the happiest I’ll ever be.’ The kids really got it right. The five-year-olds know where it’s at.”
She thinks La La Land is the greatest movie of all time.
“It’s just a timeless movie,” Rodrigo says. “I always wonder what pieces of culture are going to transcend. Do you ever think about that? In 2050, what are they going to look back and think about the 2020s? How we look back on, like, the Eighties and Madonna. I think La La Land will definitely transcend.”
She views Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano as the ultimate couple.
“That is my idea of a perfect relationship,” she says of the actors, who have been together since 2007. Rodrigo is also a huge fan of 2012’s Ruby Sparks, which stars Kazan and Dano. “I saw it recently and it changed my life,” she says. “Zoe wrote it. Basically, this guy’s a writer and he writes this dream girl that he makes up in his head — a manic pixie dream girl — and suddenly she just shows up in his house one day. And then he starts writing to change her and she’s not what he wants her to be. It’s what the plot of Barbie is: a feminist metaphor.”
She loves a good picnic.
While watching Patti LuPone pay tribute to Stephen Sondheim at the Hollywood Bowl last summer, Rodrigo had a picnic of cheese and wine with a friend. “I’ve never gotten there early enough to know that that’s what you can do,” she says of the L.A. venue. “I got some Erewhon brie. I’m trying to be the friend who brings things. Everyone always needs a friend like that.” (After the show, she met LuPone.)
She plans to catch up on TV while on the road.
While Rodrigo is a cinephile who keeps a Letterboxd account, she admits she’s behind on television, and she’s hoping to carve out some time to catch up on the Guts tour. “When you’re on tour and you’re so scattered, it’s nice to have a show to watch when you get back to your bus,” she says.
She has a full watch list: Succession (“I should have watched it while everyone was watching it”), Girls (“I feel like it’s having a resurgence”), and the next season of The White Lotus (“The first season is based on wealth, the second they made it about sex, and the third one is going to be religious-themed. I’m so excited”). Then there’s some shows that stress her out, like The Bear and The Sopranos. “I didn’t finish it,” she says of the HBO mob saga. “I love that show, [but] it’s just so long. Sometimes I don’t have an hour and 15 to devote.”
Baking relaxes her.
Rodrigo loves to make cupcakes, banana bread, and cookies. “My favorite baked good of all time is the oatmeal cookie,” she says. “I’m a grandma.”
She loves the return of Nineties rock.
“It’s just so raw and different, and that’s always the kind of stuff I’m attracted to,” she says. “I feel like TikTok is giving songs a second life, which is cool.” During our days together, Rodrigo mentioned her love of the Indigo Girls, Sheryl Crow, Tori Amos, and others, even noting she watched the Woodstock ’99 documentary. “It feels like a music revolution to me,” she adds. “I imagine being in that time was like, ‘Holy shit. Nirvana on the radio, what the fuck?’”
She wants to tour in the Philippines.
Rodrigo is half-Filipino, and she plans on touring there soon. “People there are so welcoming and hospitable and awesome,” Rodrigo says. “Filipino people ride for other Filipino people.”
She was starstruck meeting Patti Smith.
Rodrigo is a huge fan of Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids, to the extent that she can’t wait to visit the Chelsea Hotel. She met her hero earlier this year, and admitted she was incredibly nervous. “She signed a book for me,” she said. “I was very starstruck. Sometimes I meet people — I felt this way about meeting Tori [Amos] — where I just look at them and I’m like, ‘You are not of this world. You are such an ethereal being.’ She was so sweet.”
She’s still buds with Jenna Ortega.
Ortega was another young Disney star, voicing in the animated series Elena of Avalor, starring in Stuck in the Middle, and even appearing on an episode of Bizaardvark with Rodrigo and Hu. When I mention to Rodrigo that her career has taken off around the same time as Ortega’s — with both Wednesday and Sour hitting — she says they’ve discussed it. “We talk about it sometimes,” she says. “It’s just so nice to see cool, hard-working people win in such a big way.”
She almost didn’t make it to the 2022 Grammys.
In April 2022, Rodrigo was slated to perform at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards, then kick off her Sour tour two days later on April 5 in Portland, Oregon. “Honestly, that era of my life was so jam-packed,” she says. “I had so much shit to do. I had a week of rehearsal for both the Grammys and my tour, which was not enough time in hindsight. And two days into the rehearsal, I got the flu and I was sick as a dog. I couldn’t even stand. It was in Vegas and I couldn’t fly — my doctor was worried that my ears were going to pop on the plane. It was crazy. But it worked out.” It did indeed: Rodrigo performed “Drivers License” that night and took home three awards, including Best New Artist.
She has an idea for Greta Gerwig.
As she mentioned several times over the course of our hours together, Rodrigo is a huge fan of the Barbie director. She’d love for Gerwig to adapt one of her favorite books she read as a child. “I love Little House on the Prairie,” she says. “Can’t wait for the Greta Gerwig adaptation of that.”
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