Tate McRae’s penchant for acrobatic dance moves and breathy singing style certainly invites comparisons to pop idol Britney Spears. But in the interview accompanying her January 2026 cover of Rolling Stone—which itself seems to be a throwback to the “Toxic” singer’s own 2000s-era RS covers—McRae revealed she’s hesitant to do what fans have been begging for: play Spears in a biopic.
“I need to take an acting lesson before I’d even consider ever doing anything,” she told Rolling Stone. “And also, I feel like I look nothing like her or sound nothing like her, so I don’t know if I’d be a great fit.”
The interview touches on a variety of milestones in McRae’s life, including her June split with Kid Laroi just months after the release of their “I Know Love” duet and the more recently released “Tit for Tat,” which is widely speculated to be a breakup song. More specifically, McRae talks about what it was like to have her private life, i.e. her relationship with Laroi, scrutinized by the public.
“It was really scary and overwhelming,” she told Rolling Stone. “I would never talk that way, even about my friends’ lives. I didn’t realize how much it would affect me, the public knowing my private life—because no one knows the full story of anything, ever. I also hate people painting a situation that’s worse than it is. But what I’ve had to realize is that he’s going to write songs and I’m going to write songs, and that’s our way of expressing ourselves. That’s our art, that’s our job. And once it’s out there, it’s not mine anymore.”
McRae’s artistic expression in “Tit for Tat” drew high praise from Taylor Swift, who gushed about the track on The Tonight Show while promoting The Life of a Showgirl, telling host Jimmy Fallon that she listens with “full volume, over and over again on repeat.”
“When I pulled up my phone and saw that she had talked about it, it was one of the coolest moments ever,” McRae said. “She is such an inspiration for me as a writer and, obviously, as a woman in the industry. For her to acknowledge that was really special.”
The article also discusses McRae’s pre-fame ambitions, including her stint at age 12 on So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation and her early releases on YouTube, the first being a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine” she recorded when she was 8. In fact, it was McRae’s ballad “One Day,” which she uploaded to YouTube at her parents’ house, that led to her first record deal with RCA in 2019.
Most sensationally, McRae also addressed her collaboration with country superstar Morgan Wallen on the sultry chart-topping hit “What I Want,” which became McRae’s first No. 1 single after its release on May 16, 2025. Before the song was recorded, Wallen had endured several headline-grabbing controversies, including drunkenly uttering a racial slur on camera after a night out in Nashville in 2021 and throwing a chair off the roof of a Nashville bar in 2024.
“I’ve always wanted, at some point in my life, to do folk music or country, and I probably still will in the future,” she said in defense of the track. “But I honestly just got the opportunity to do a country song, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ And I wanted to cross genres really bad. It was just about the song for me. I didn’t realize how much a song would be connected to all the other factors, and it really shocked me.”
“I don’t think you should regret anything in life, because it gives you so much clarity,” she continued. “I think controversy and criticism is a way of learning and figuring out what you want to move forward with, and how that shapes you as a person. I think it’s all important.”