Kid Cudi had a problem. The musician and actor was locked down, like everyone else, with nothing to watch. What he really wanted, he says, without much explanation, was to finally see the Sex and the City movie, but he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to keep up if he hadn’t watched the show. Then he realized home confinement has its perks: He now actually had time to do both. “I just binged the entire six seasons,” he says with a laugh.
He sounds relaxed, a feeling he’s still getting used to. Four years ago, Cudi was balancing his role as a famously productive rapper and trying to keep a still-nascent acting career in the air. He was anxious. He was self-medicating. He was burning out. So, after nearly a decade in the spotlight, he hit the brakes. “I think it was just everything finally catching up to me,” he says. Cudi checked himself into a rehab facility, fending off public speculation (and some disses from Drake), and stayed quiet. He didn’t know when he’d be back.
Now, Kid Cudi is on seemingly every screen that’s left broadcasting through the pandemic and, somewhat counterintuitively for a 36-year-old rapper, enjoying a commercial peak musically. In addition to a chart-topping single released in April, he’s booking roles in film and TV projects like never before in his career. It’s “like a rainstorm,” he says of the string of acting appearances he’s made recently, from Westworld to Bill & Ted Face the Music to, most recently, HBO’s We Are Who We Are. “A monsoon.”
When Luca Guadagnino, the mind behind We Are Who We Are, first met Cudi over Skype last year, “He just said, ‘Oh my God, you’re so beautiful!’” Cudi says. The Italian writer and director is best known for the dreamy, elegiac Call Me by Your Name, which featured star-making, thirst-launching turns from Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer (and, it should be mentioned, the northern Italian countryside). But even with those qualifications he was no match for Cudi’s face—soft features, twinkling eyes, and a sly grin, all framed by an impossibly angular jawline. During that same meeting, Guadagnino remembers telling Cudi, whose name is Scott Mescudi, “‘I cannot look at you,’ because, you know, I like beautiful men.’ And Scott is very refined.”
The two hit it off. “He’s a great actor,” Guadagnino says, “But for me to be on set is to be with people that I worship, that I love, that I want to spend time with, and I felt that energy with him.” Cudi felt similarly — “He’s the sweetest man,” he says, “It was always, ‘Scott, my love!’ — and he booked the part.
“I can’t believe I got the role,” Cudi says. After his call with Guadagnino, he phoned his friend Timothee Chalamet, an avowed Cudi stan whose breakout role was as the lovestruck Elio in Call Me by Your Name. “I asked Timmy if he said something to [Luca] or anything to plug me. I thought that was all Timmy when he hit me up, truthfully,” Cudi says. “He was like, ‘No, bro, I was playing your music on set and telling him who you were… No.’”
“So I was like, ‘Oh, this is fucking ill. Just the universe lining up just right.”
We Are Who We Are takes place on an American military base in Italy, and focuses on the children of the servicemen and women. Cudi plays Richard Poythress, an officer who has a tight-knit bond with his daughter, Caitlin (played by Jordan Kristine Seamón), who is beginning to experiment with her gender fluidity. Not long after his call with Guadagnino, Cudi was in Italy, preparing for his role by learning military drills and eating “mad pasta.”
The biggest problem, at first, was that the baby-faced Cudi would have to believably play a man with high school-aged children. “Did you notice that they gave me gray hair?” he asks over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. I did not. He pauses. “Maybe we should have put it on thicker.”
For Cudi, the role of Richard was an about-face. He typically plays the most charming man in the room, a deft touch in a cameo, but rarely the centerpiece of a scene. “I’ve done a really good job being the goofy best friend, or the stoner,” he says. Richard was different, an industrious, particular man who likes things done by the book and struggles to contain a submerged, seemingly directionless anger. Richard takes a prickly joy in ironing his uniform; Cudi is famous for popularizing the male crop top. “Richard is a character that couldn’t be more far from Scott,” Guadagnino says. “It’s the opposite.”
It still felt like the right role to Cudi, something he hadn’t done before but that he could handle. “It wasn’t just this buttoned-up family, nice and neat. I liked the trouble that’s hovering behind them,” Cudi says. “I came from, you can kind of say, a dysfunctional household. It just felt real and honest.”
“I’m getting older. I’m not 26 anymore,” he goes on. “I’m going to be approached to do older roles, and more mature roles. I’m really just trying to transition.” He hopes We Are Who We Are showcases a new side of him, something that proves he can make it in a dramatic feature. And working with someone like Guadagnino is also part of the plan. “Watching Luca every day, I was in awe of him.”
Despite his willingness to plumb new depths in his acting, there was one scene that gave Cudi pause when he realized what the role would entail: Guadagnino had written his character as a Trump supporter. “I read the scripts and at first I was taken aback, because I have my beliefs,” he says. “I’m not a Trump supporter. I don’t know if the world knows that, but I was just really concerned about what people may think.”
In the series’ second episode, Cudi’s Richard receives a package and excitedly calls over his daughter to open it together. Inside are two Make America Great Again hats; Richard puts his on, but Caitlin can’t fit hers over her hair. They laugh about it. All the while, Cudi plays the scene surprisingly. His character has a deep well of anger, but instead of wearing the hat as an act of provocation, he creates a surreptitious, tender moment. They’re not allowed to wear the hats outside on the base, Richard tells Caitlin, he just clearly wants her to be excited about something he ostensibly believes in.
“That’s what really made me understand the moment a little bit more. It wasn’t about the hat, necessarily,” Cudi says. He’s a father, and related to a small part of Richard. “That’s what made me fall in love with this character: He has this bond with his daughter.” Cudi calls Jordan Kristine Seamón, who plays his daughter, the best scene partner he’s ever had. “As soon as I got to Italy, I wanted to meet up with her. I wanted to connect with her, because I knew she did music. So I connected with her mom; I connected with her dad. We would all do game nights at their apartment.”
Once he trusted everyone involved, he was ready to pull on a red hat in front of the camera. “I talked to Luca and it all made sense to me at the end of the day,” he says. “Look, it’s a character I’m playing and I was fully invested in that, you know? At the end of the day, I hope that people can accept that for what it is, and not go and be like, ‘Oh, shit, Cudi’s a Trump supporter now—he’s wearing a MAGA hat.’”
One thing, though, further complicated that scene, as if the current battle over the soul of a nation were not enough: Kanye West. West was an early mentor, and largely responsible for bringing Cudi to national attention. In 2008, he heard Cudi’s breakout mixtape, A Kid Named Cudi, which melded Cudi’s freewheeling sense of melody with hip-hop beats that captured the genre-bending experimentation of the ‘00s blog era, and got inspired. Not long after, Cudi was on a plane to Hawaii to work on what would become 808s & Heartbreak, West’s most stylistically daring album (Yeezus is a close second), helping the superstar mourn the loss of his mother and a broken engagement, filtered through Auto-Tune, on record. West would go on to executive-produce Cudi’s debut album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, which would spawn his introductory hits: “Day ’n’ Nite” and “Pursuit of Happiness.”
“I thought some people would be foolish about it and be like, ‘Oh, he must’ve talked to Kanye’ or ‘Kanye must’ve got to him’ or some shit like that,” Cudi says of the MAGA hat scene and his friend’s yearslong association with Trump. “I think he knows where I stand, and I think he doesn’t bring it up to me. We just don’t talk about it. I totally disagree with it; I think he knows that. And if he doesn’t know, he knows now.”
“That’s my brother. I’ll go on record: That’s my brother. I love him,” Cudi goes on. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with everything he fucking says and he fucking does, you know?”
Politics aside, Cudi and West’s relationship is still a foundationally important one to him. The pair released a collaborative album in 2018, after West’s pivot towards antagonism via conservatism, under the moniker Kids See Ghosts. Cudi credits the project with helping him regain his footing after the lowest period in his life.
“I almost fucking lost my mind twice. I almost took myself out of here,” he says. “So something had to change with my lifestyle. Drastically, something had to change.”
In 2016, Cudi checked himself into rehab to treat depression and suicidal urges, writing an emotionally charged and heart-rippingly honest statement to his fans. “I am not at peace. I haven’t been since you’ve known me. If I didn’t come here, I would’ve done something to myself,” he wrote. “I deserve to have peace. I deserve to be happy and smiling… Im scared, im sad, I feel like I let a lot of people down and again, Im sorry. Its time I fix me.”
“I think I was just dealing with a lot of shit from years and years and years of trying to just hide things and not confront shit and self-medicate with alcohol and drugs,” Cudi says now. “It was going to happen sooner or later. I’m happy it happened when it did, in a way where I was like, ‘Okay, now I need to get me some help. I feel that I’m going to break soon, and if I don’t fucking get help, shit’s going to get bad.’”
So, starting in 2016, he took a break. “The first thing I needed to do was take a step back from music a little bit,” he says. From Man on the Moon on, Kid Cudi released an album almost every year, a punishing schedule that led to increasingly experimental music. “That kind of took its toll on me,” he says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to take a year off and just see what happens. Not think about music.’”
“I didn’t know when I would do another solo. I didn’t know if I had it in me anytime soon,” he says. A little under a year into his musical hiatus, though, West called with an idea. Fans had been clamoring for a joint from the pair since 2008, when Cudi burst mournfully onto the scene in a showstopping guest appearance on West’s “Welcome to Heartbreak.” It was time to give them what they wanted.
“I felt a little bit more confident because I had my friend lifting me up,” Cudi says. “That kind of brought me back.” The pair convened a group of their closest collaborators and began work on what would become a seven-track album in December of 2016, starting by coming up with beats and freestyles at West’s house but eventually traveling to Japan and China to record in the summer of 2017. “Coming from 2016, it was like hell. I was happy to do Kids See Ghosts; I was ecstatic to be alive.”
“Whenever we feel like we’ve seen it all in life, or there’s nothing more to do,” he says, “God tells you, ‘Yo, you’re not done here. You still have more work to do here.’”
After he wrapped Kids See Ghosts, Cudi took another break. It helped. “I’m really learning the art of pacing myself,” he says. “I don’t think I knew how to pace myself before. I was always just like, ‘Work, work, work, work, work. This is my dream. Ain’t no telling how long it’s going to last.’” Now Cudi is something of a self-care kind, taking breaks when he needs to, working his support system, and enthusiastically shouting out his therapist by name during our interview.
It also turned out that Kid Cudi was no longer the kind of artist who needed to release an album every year to stay relevant. Throughout the early 2010s, Cudi cut a fascinating figure in the music industry: an all-purpose player with some of the best melodic instincts hip-hop has ever seen, the hits to match, and a Rolodex of the biggest names in the game. And with those enviable resources, he decided to make the weirdest shit he could. He collaborated with anyone he thought was cool (seriously, anyone: dude has Father John Misty, Kendrick Lamar, Haim, and Michael Bolton on the same album), increasingly pulled from psych-rock influences (he eventually recorded two full-on, ill-advised rock albums), and, essentially, refused to ever think of his art as a commercial venture.
“I think the truth is what brings people to me,” Cudi says. “The fact that they’re going to get something unfiltered from me to them is something that has people so invested in me.” While contemporaries like Drake and Kendrick Lamar became the best-selling artists of their generation, Cudi always seemed content with simply following his own muses. It won him a huge cult following and, though it may have frustrated his label heads, it guaranteed his longevity in a genre that prizes youth above almost all else.
In terms of high-profile Cudder adherents, Timothee Chalamet is part of a large club. If you’re a young star with an interest in music, fashion, film, and making art for the sake of art, there’s a good chance you’re also someone who idolizes Cudi. “Travis [Scott] is my number-one supporter,” he says. “Him, Jaden [Smith]—these are my number-one supporters. It’s a beautiful thing when you take a step back and look at it.”
For a musician like Kid Cudi—eclectic, omnivorous, committed to an individual vision—influencing another generation was always a given. He makes art for artists. What happens less often is for influential artists to have the ability to collaborate with the people they influenced. “I’m like a big kid in the studio,” Cudi says of working with someone like Jaden Smith. “I think there’s a youthfulness to the excitement. Everything magnified times a trillion.”
Cudi’s openness to collaboration paid off in a big way this year when he hopped in the booth with Travis Scott, a Cudi fan who’s since become (arguably) the biggest rapper on the planet. “I was kind of nervous about doing a song with Travis,” he admits. “I was like, ‘Man, he looks up to me so much. What if I don’t show up on this song? What if I suck?’”
The song the pair made, “THE SCOTTS”—Cudi’s full name is Scott Mescudi, and Travis Scott is, well, Travis Scott—did not suck. What’s more, it became the biggest hit of Cudi’s career (it’s been streamed 360 million times on Spotify to date) and his first-ever number-one song. “I don’t get anything out of this unless I’m working with my family; that’s when shit really means something,” Cudi says. “Seeing that I got my first number one with Trav, that means the most to me. It wasn’t just with some other person. It was with Trav.”
The achievement touched Cudi so much that he got “The Scotts” tattooed on his arm, “really big.” He hasn’t shown anyone yet.
It also reinvigorated him. After his time away, he’s as excited about music as ever, though, in a reversal of roles, Travis Scott seems to be rubbing off on him. “Turn the beats up. Bring those BPMs up. Get the party fucking started. That’s what I’m on now,” he says. “I think I’ve made all the mid-tempo, slow records I could ever make in my career, and now it’s all about fucking turning up.”
This rejuvenation of his music career is coming at the same time that he’s feeling more engaged in film and TV than ever before. This year, in addition to We Are Who We Are, the latest season of Westworld, and popping up in Bill & Ted Face the Music, he’s prepping an animated series for Netflix that will premiere next year (and feature his sister, another collaboration goal for Cudi) and working on his own scripts. “I feel like I’m still very much new to this shit, even though it’s been 10, 11 years,” he says. “I still feel like I’m a newcomer.”
So he asks for help, often. “My favorite actor is Shia LaBeouf, right? And he’s my best friend,” Cudi says. “I be wanting him to see all the shit that I do, because if Shia loves it, I know it’s good. Because he keeps it funky with me. He’s a real one, and there’s not a lot of real ones in this business.” Cudi has LaBeouf over to his house to watch his performances and get notes. “I have friends that I look up to and can learn from. Like Robert Pattinson is another; he’s the illest actor. He’s up there with Shia. Timmy [Chalamet] as well. And a new friend, John David Washington.” (Cudi got to see Tenet in a private IMAX screening: “It was fucking ill.”)
“I learn from these guys,” he says. “I try to make sure Rob can see an episode; I try to make sure John comes over to see an episode. I want them to see my shit, you know, because I want to know what they think. I honor these guys in such a major way. I’ll send Timmy audition tapes, like, ‘Yo, tell me if this is good or not.’ And he’ll tell me! I’ve got some support. It’s dope.”
Despite the world being shut down, Cudi is having a banner year—the best of his career, to hear him tell it. But with it comes the responsibility to make sure he doesn’t find himself burning out again. “I have a more solid foundation,” he says. “If I ever get to that place where things might feel a little out of control, I can always take a step back.”
Taking a step back is a luxury he didn’t allow himself in the beginning of his career, something he now recognizes won’t be fatal to the ongoing project of Kid Cudi. And with that knowledge comes the ability to try new things creatively or, if it strikes his fancy, run through every episode of New Girl. “I’m totally in the best place, and I’ve been managing everything.”
“I just want people to know that I’m really, really happy.”
Photography: Nabil Elderkin. Grooming: Alexa Hernandez using Shiseido. Barber: Ibn Jasper. Editor: Matt Miller. Executive Director of Talent: Randi Peck.
