Megan Thee Stallion's Reign Check

Megan Thee Stallion knows her fans are growing impatient. So is she. While I wait for her at New York’s Ludlow House on a perfect July Sunday, she’s on X, assuring the hotties—her fiercely loyal fan base—that Act III is coming soon. “I really appreciate how passionate they are, and it makes me feel good knowing that I have a fan base that cares about rap as much as I do,” she says when she arrives. “They’re very serious about my career.”

She’d wanted to give them another Hot Girl Summer. Instead, she spent much of the season in Miami with her producers, recording and rewriting until the album felt right. “I was very sad because I came to the realization that I was not gonna drop a summer album,” she says. “I wanted to take my time and record and really write and figure it out.”

We’re seated at two tables in front of the curtained screen of Ludlow House’s otherwise empty private cinema. Her bodyguard is just down the hall, eating lunch at a table facing the open door of the theater; her publicist and a patient waiter hover nearby. “I feel like I’m happy about this album, even though it didn’t come [out] in the summertime. But that’s okay, because it’s Tina Snow,” she adds, referring to her Pimp C– inspired alter ego.

The album is one reason she’s in New York this weekend. She’s here to put the finishing touches on it, with hopes of releasing it soon. But all that work should also come with a little bit of fun: She spent the previous two nights in the Bronx, attending Jay-Z’s Yankee Stadium shows. The second night turned into a bit of a rager for Meg, who didn’t get back to her hotel until dawn.

“When I go out, I have to make it a movie because I barely get the chance
to go out,” she says. After the show, she ended up at a comedy club with her friends (“I was like, ‘Wow, this what y’all are saying in the New York comedy club?’ They better not put that on social media!”). “New York is giving Alice in Wonderland,” she says of the nightlife scene. “You could end up going through a washing machine and end up in a club.”

Looking at the glammed-up rapper, you couldn’t tell that her weekend plans had led her down a late-night rabbit hole. Her makeup is flawless as ever, with a glowy matte finish. Her cropped gray T-shirt bears the word LUXURY, displayed like a baseball-team logo, revealing her enviable abs. She pairs it with a Yankees cap, ripped skinny jeans, a chrome Louis Vuitton monogram bag, and a pair of strappy heels that add several inches to her 5’10” frame. She looks like she’s ready for another night out, but all she really wants is lunch.

“I’m hungry,” she says, the first real tell of the night before. She’s low-energy but not disengaged, ordering a grapefruit juice for herself and spinach artichoke dip for us to share.

Given the year Megan has had, a late night followed by a quiet recovery lunch feels well-earned. Her career hit a massive turning point this year as she expanded her brand and name outside of rap. She’s been exploring her creative side, making her Broadway debut as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical and appearing as Daniel Radcliffe’s love interest, a divorced mail carrier named Denise, on the NBC series The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. She even took a role in the Adam Sandler–produced Netflix film Roommates, as a prisoner named Louise. And beyond entertainment, the business of being a hot girl never stops. She opened her first Popeyes franchise in Miami’s South Beach at the start of the year and launched a Hot Girl Summer perfume.

For all that expansion, though, music remains a nonnegotiable. “I don’t ever see a world in which I [leave] music or let music be the backseat to anything I do,” the 31-year-old says, in case her fans were worried that the Act III delay meant she was pivoting away from it. “I don’t want to ever be just a product or an artist that doesn’t feel relatable. I am a person at the end of the day. I want to resonate with people. I feel like that’s how you have longevity, when you really connect with your audience.”

After a year in which the demands of being Megan Thee Stallion have repeatedly collided with the needs of the person underneath, that distinction feels like a necessity. Both Megan’s health and love life took massive hits this year, and she’s just starting to piece them all together again. “No matter what’s going on, I always pick myself up and go, ‘Girl, hot-girl shit,’" she says. And she doesn’t wish away those parts either. “I was supposed to learn. I was supposed to grow. I was supposed to do all the things, from my best moments and my worst moments,” she says. “I was supposed to go through that, learn from it, and survive it. It’s hard sometimes to get up and keep going, but I have to.” Clearly, she has.

This spring, Megan was in New York for what was scheduled to be an eight-week run as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. The show's emcee doubles as the owner of the titular club, and Megan was the first female-identifying actor to play the role. It was an honor for the theater fan, who had dabbled in performing back in college. “It was one of the best experiences, as a performer, in my life,” she says, adding that she had been nervous going into it. She knows how to perform as Megan Thee Stallion every day, on tour and off—but in this role, she needed to be prepared to slip into another character eight times a week.

“I don’t think I was aware of how much I was going to be putting my body through,” she admits. When she’s in Stallion mode, she’s already pretty strict with herself. She’s never late for her shows and always tries to do everything— recording, touring, visuals—to the best of her abilities. But Broadway was a whole new experience. Megan was working alongside a cast and crew who had been putting on this show for years, and for the first time, she was just one part of a much larger machine. “These people are working hard, like anybody in theater,” she says. “They’re working all week except for Mondays. I know they tired. Like, when I walked in that bitch, I be tired. And they be so happy and just upbeat. I stopped complaining.”

Kelsie Watts, who played Satine in the production, remembers having multiple conversations with Megan during rehearsals and the first week of their run together about how overwhelmed the Grammy winner was. “She was burning the candle at both ends,” Watts says. “If she wasn’t in rehearsals, then she was going to work on her album, or she was going to do press or a photo shoot. A lot of people don’t realize, eight shows a week is just different. Until you do it, you can’t describe it, but it’s really freaking hard, and I think she was just exhausted.”

Megan gave her first performance in Moulin Rouge! on March 24 to an audience full of her passionate hotties who had traveled far and wide to see her debut. She was ecstatic, moved, and already growing close with the cast. But the pressure and stress were beginning to take their toll on her physically. During her March 31 performance, just one week into her run, she was rushed to the hospital.

“I didn’t want to let anyone down,” she says. Her eyes have begun welling up, and she dabs them carefully with a napkin as she recalls the incident. At the time, Megan was aware of how depleted she had become. In spite of the demands of the musical, she hadn’t been eating properly and was dehydrated. She admits she had been showing up to the job every day “a little bit mentally not okay.”

“I thought I was having a stroke,” she says. “I wasn’t getting any oxygen to my brain, so my hands had froze. My face had froze. I was trying to tell everybody that I don’t think I’m okay. They only thought I was dehydrated.”

Watts remembers observing how different Megan looked at the beginning of that performance. “The very first time that we interact is after the song ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ and we come out onto what’s called the passerelle. It’s right next to the front row, and we have this little interaction scene with each other. I looked at her, and she had barely any color in her face, was shaking, was sweating, and I was like, ‘This is not normal,’ especially for her and for someone who does work as hard as she does and wants to push through. When I got offstage, I was like, ‘Something’s gonna happen. She’s not okay.’”

The production paused for about 20 minutes. Watts recalls how much convincing it took to get Megan, who wanted to keep performing, to go to the hospital. “She wanted to keep doing the show because she knew that so many hotties were there and so many people were excited to see her, but she had to [go],” Watts says. At the hospital, Megan was exhausted and having a panic attack.

But for someone whose body had just forced her to stop, Megan didn’t stay stopped for long. She was back onstage just two days later and stayed with the show for another month before ending her run two weeks early on May 1. Within months, she was back in the studio.

“I’m definitely trying to stay more hydrated and be more calm,” she says when I ask her how she’s been taking care of herself since. Watts saw some of those changes firsthand: Megan cut her schedule from eight shows a week to seven and stopped packing her days with work outside the theater. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, when Moulin Rouge! puts on two shows a day, Megan and Watts would spend some downtime together between performances, then grab low-key dinners together after the shows.

“It was like a little bit of a better balance instead of her trying to put so much into one day and so much on her plate,” Watts says.

After taking some time to settle back into being Megan Thee Stallion rather than Zidler, she was able to return to the role on very different terms. In June, just over a month after leaving the show, she reprised the character at the Tony Awards, alongside host P!nk. “It was amazing,” she says. “I was so happy.”

But Broadway wasn’t the only thing weighing on Megan that spring. In late April, before announcing her early departure from Moulin Rouge!, Megan took to her Instagram story to announce that she and her then-boyfriend, Dallas Mavericks star Klay Thompson, had ended their relationship.

On Instagram, she accused Thompson of cheating, getting “cold feet” and having “HORRIBLE mood swings” during the basketball season, all while he had her “playing house” with his entire family. She further indicated that Thompson had claimed to her that monogamy might not be for him. In a later statement, she said, “Trust, fidelity and respect are non-negotiable for me in a relationship, and when those values are compromised, there’s no real path forward. I’m taking this time to prioritize myself and move ahead with peace and clarity.”

The pair had gone public with their relationship in 2025 and let the world in on what felt like a romantic fantasy. They posted joint workout videos and pictures of large dinners with Thompson’s family, including meals Megan appeared to have cooked for the entire clan. Last October, she had hinted at the two moving in together, sharing a photo of their two hands forming a heart and holding a set of keys in front of a home.

When I ask how she is thinking about love at this point in her life, she takes a long pause. “I’m not thinking about anything romantic,” she says after ordering more water. “I’m definitely not thinking about no damn relationship.”

It’s clear the subject is still tender. The typically extroverted, bawdy star is quiet, careful, and, again, trying to stave off tears as she speaks. She says she has been letting herself feel it rather than trying to rush past the heartbreak. “I’m not pretending I’m 100 percent okay,” she says. “I ain’t never been through nothing like that in my whole life. I’ve never, ever, ever been in a relationship like that, ever. So I’m definitely not worried about another one for a long time.”

She is still grieving the loss of the future she thought she had found, she adds. “It was so abrupt. I’m in shock still.” But from where she is now, Megan believes she’s better off on her own—and shies away from further details on what transpired.

“When something is meant for you, it’s gonna be easy,” she says. “It’s gonna be right. It’s not gonna feel like a panic all the time. I feel like that’s what I was in, constantly on edge. My nervous system needed to calm down. I feel like I was in a panic 24/7. I’m still not eating all the way right. I’m feeling all the feelings. I’m not trying to take no shortcuts.”

The breakup, she says, was also a reminder to trust her intuition. “Sometimes I be knowing in my gut and in my heart, then you give so much benefit of the doubt,” she says. “No, the gut is always right. Listen.”

We start discussing the onslaught of hard lessons we’ve both experienced in our early 30s, the realization that making it through the messiness of your 20s does not exempt you from entirely new messes. She had spent so much of her life begging God for signs that someone was right for her. At this point, she’s over it. “No more signs,” she laughs. “Send us an email. Call, please! They never, ever stop. Sorry I asked. I ain’t asking for shit right now.”

This year had plenty of hard lessons, but they all taught Megan that she can—and should—take back control of her life. She’s more conscious of how she spends her days: focusing on one job at a time, making art with people she trusts, spending time with people who make her feel safe, and limiting external noise and critique. The only social media apps she has on her phone these days are Pinterest and TikTok. (She only got access to her X account by borrowing her social media manager’s phone earlier in the day.) “I’m not looking at anything anybody is saying, because I would be in my feelings all day,” she says.

“Anything you create, you feel sensitive about. If somebody don’t compliment your food, you’re gonna be upset about that. If you put on an outfit you really put thought into and somebody has something to say, you’ll be like, ‘Damn, I thought my shit was fire.’ I had to realize one of the things that makes me sensitive is social media.”

She’s carefully curated a TikTok algorithm that maintains her peace. Her For You page serves up videos on aliens, the ocean, Frenchies, Dobermans, and mukbangs. She’s big on BookTok too, and she consumes murder mysteries and thrillers on her phone, every free moment she has. “I really love reading, and I’m trying to figure out what I can do in that space,” she says, mulling a book club or a Kindle partnership. “I want to engage the hotties in reading.”

She pulls out her phone, secured inside a teddy-bear-shaped case, to list off her recent favorites: Nita Prose’s The Maid, Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister, anything by Ruth Ware. After picking up One of Us Is Dead, she dove into all of author Jeneva Rose’s work.

“If she is making a movie, please put me in it. Because whatever I gotta do to be a part of that...” Megan says. “That book was so good. I could finish a book in probably like two days. I’m staying through it, top to bottom all day, through glam, through a shoot, on a break, on a plane. I’m finishing the book. That was a good book. Jenny ate that.”

Megan was an early Colleen Hoover fan too but is so offline that she didn’t realize how popular the author’s books had become until the drama around the 2024 film adaptation of It Ends With Us blew up. “I had nobody to talk about it with because none of my friends read these kinds of books,” she says. “I’m keeping up with the movie and the drama. It was tea for me.” Even celebrities escape through other celebrities’ drama.

Her friends may not share her taste in books, but they have been a constant for Megan through a difficult year. As she talks about her chosen family, her face lights up. She does everything with her hairstylist Kellon Deryck. “As soon as I met him, I feel like we just connected instantly, barely any words,” she says. “He read my mind, and I feel like I was reading his.” She considers her manager T. Farris to be family. “He’s like my brother,” she says. “That’s not even a friend, that’s family. After my mama passed, he took me in, and he’s been with me ever since.” Then there’s Jayla, her best friend since college, whom she met back in Houston in 2013. Though Jayla now lives in Dallas, Megan still sees her as a steady, reliable “ride or die.”

With them, she rarely has to ask for support. “When I’m having a bad day, I damn near forget I’m having a bad day because they’re just there, and it just takes my mind off of it immediately,” she adds. That circle has grown alongside her newer creative pursuits, including Watts, who bonded with Megan over their Texas roots while working together on Broadway. The two have kept in touch all summer.

“She FaceTimed me while I was in a show the other day,” Watts says. “Conveniently, it was during intermission. We talked the whole intermission.” On the call, Megan invited her out to Miami to work on a song together after Moulin Rouge! closes in August. “She’s an international superstar. I didn’t expect to make a friend,” Watts adds, noting that Megan had already made plans to come to the closing party for the show. “She is just 100 percent a girl’s girl. What you see is what you get. She’s real. She’s honest. She’s a really hard worker. She’s fun. She’s kind and loving and energetic. She really is what you would want in a friend.”

Megan clearly knows how to find the right work families. She gushes about the entire cast of Reggie Dinkins, especially her primary scene partner, Radcliffe. “I was on that set, calling that man Harry Potter all day,” she exclaims. He clearly took it in stride. “Daniel made me feel so, so, so comfortable. We were literally talking and joking the whole time. I think that’s why the chemistry was so good.”

“We were honestly so lucky to get Megan to be on the show,” Radcliffe says. “Normally, it takes a few seasons for people as famous as she is to guest-star. But Megan dived in and was totally game, from the first moment she stepped on set. She’s a total pro, a delight to work with, and really fucking funny.” Megan had such a good time on set that she’s hoping they call her back for season two. “They have to,” she says. “They did not give my girl enough time. That love story needs to develop.”

Work has pushed Megan hard this year, but the studio also remains a place where she can make sense of what she’s going through—or simply find some relief from it. She unleashes everything through her music, either by explicitly detailing what she is going through in her lyrics or by making songs that allow her to escape in the moment. “I do make music that reflects the way I feel,” she explains. “But I could be having a terrible, terrible, terrible day, and then I would go write something like ‘Freak Nasty’ just because I feel inspired to go write something hard. So in my new album, I feel like I went through all the feelings.”

We barely make a dent in the spinach-artichoke dip before we have to clear out for a screening in the cinema. We move to a small table in the room where her bodyguard had been stationed. “I have the [same] ring,” she says, noticing the giant pink bauble I got from Mondo Mondo now that we’re sitting closer. “The girls don’t have that. They don’t know.”

Once we’re settled, the conversation turns back to Act III. Megan makes it clear there is still a lot left she wants to prove to herself. She says she stopped caring about making people like her after releasing her album Traumazine. “I’m not fighting for validation,” she says. She thinks back to being young, still discovering her voice, and being genuinely unconcerned with what anyone thought. Fame complicated that. At some point, she says, keeping the career she had built began to feel tangled up with keeping everyone on her side. “I just had to learn, when somebody makes their mind up about you, that’s what it is,” she says. “I feel like I was able to be a little more free in making music and making decisions because I feel like, for a long point in life, I was definitely trying to make people like me.”

Working with many of the same people from her recent projects has given her enough familiarity to experiment, and one piece of outside criticism has given that experimentation a target: the claim that every Megan Thee Stallion song has the same flow. “I think I have such a distinct voice, such a distinct sound, such a distinct accent. I feel like sometimes people are interpreting it as ‘She sounds the same on all her songs.’”

For the record, Megan would push back on that characterization; she believes she switches up both her flow and style plenty. But she has started wondering whether her “thick-ass accent” makes those differences harder to hear, so this time around, she began stretching her voice in new directions. “It was a little bit out of my comfort zone to try my voice in a different way or over a different kind of beat,” she says. “I was a little shy this go-round, but everybody has been so supportive in hyping me up. I feel like the hotties are gonna appreciate this.”

If Act III is where Megan has gone “through all the feelings,” she doesn’t seem interested in making the result sound solemn. In a June preview of a new song, she rapped, “All that wifey shit is dead/Put that shit to bed.” For Megan, all that healing leaves even more room for hot-girl shit. “It’s always hot-girl shit,” she confirms, with a big, bright smile. She remains coy about the sound but not the attitude; any longtime listener knows that when Megan says it’s time for hot-girl shit, it means that good vibes are coming. “No matter what’s going on, I definitely always pick myself up,” she assures.

Megan’s learning how to move forward without pretending everything is behind her. Act III, it turns out, is being made from somewhere in the middle.

Megan Thee Stallion Answers Your Questions on Dating, Confidence & More | Marie Claire - YouTube

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Stylist Dione Davis | Hairstylist Kellon Deryck | Makeup artist Priscilla Ono | Manicurist Jay | Set designer WayOut Studio

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.