Sabrina Carpenter is a freak (manifester)

In a cover story for PAPER magazine just days before the August 23 release date of her latest album, Short ’n Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter opened up about her success, and what it feels like to have finally achieved her goal of being a popstar, something she says she was ‘destined’ for. 

Her first few brushes with fame were small roles in different TV shows. And while her first major role came when she was cast as Maya Hart on Disney’s Girl Meets World didn’t have much to do with music, per se, appearing in the Disney series certainly gave her the confidence she needed to start releasing her songs, which she did shortly after landing the role. 

During the interview, Sabrina described a sense of certainty about the fact that her hard work would pay off someday, saying: 

“I’m a little bit of a freak manifester sometimes. I always knew deep down that this was something I would do with my life, and I didn't ever really doubt that.”

There’s no doubt that Sabrina’s innate confidence and sense of certainty in her destiny is refreshing. We love a self-assured woman. And while it likely has a lot to do with her work ethic and her creativity, and the fact that she can really sing, there’s also the fact that her aunt is none other than Nancy Cartwright – best known for being the voice of Bart Simpson (and Nelson Muntz, Todd Flanders, and Ralph Wiggum. Plus several others in the world of cartoons). 

If you, like so many others, are a nepotism-denier and think that her aunt voicing a character in one of the longest running series in history has nothing to do with her success, let’s take a look at what both of them have said about their connection in the past.

Back in 2021, there were two separate interviews where Sabrina gushed about her father’s sister, Nancy. She appeared in a WIRED auto-complete interview, saying: 

“We work on kind of like different ends of the industry, but I’ve learned so much just from, like, observing her and she’s so talented.” 

And earlier that year, during a conversation with Capital FM, she said Nancy’s celebrity status was "the coolest thing in the world" when she was growing up, despite not actually being allowed to watch The Simpsons until she got a bit older. During that interview, she also revealed that her aunt once landed them a table at a packed restaurant by doing the Bart Simpson voice. (This was an interesting revelation for me to discover after I wrote about Serena Williams being denied at a Parisian restaurant because they were fully booked. This is what I meant when I said, sometimes, even in packed restaurants, for the “right” celebrity, room or accommodations can and will be made.)

But Nancy, who also spoke to Capital FM in March of 2021, disputed how they were connected. She said that she and Sabrina weren’t even biologically related, and that the two were connected because Sabrina’s grandmother married Nancy’s dad, and that she had only met Sabrina when she was an adolescent. She went on to say that upon learning about Sabrina’s aspirations, she let her and her family spend time at her home to witness, firsthand, life in Hollywood. And despite swearing that Sabrina made it as a singer-songwriter due to her own talent, she did assist in helping her get into an acting agency.

That’s a lot to unpack. I think it’s interesting that while Sabrina plays up their relation, skipping over the fact that Nancy and her dad are step-siblings, Nancy plays it down, likely because she knows that claims of nepotism will haunt Sabrina for the rest of her career if their relation becomes a focal point of her success. It’s also interesting that Nancy attempts to distance herself as much as possible from Sabrina acquiring opportunities, despite saying that she assisted with Sabrina getting into the acting agency, which is what led to her big break both in acting and music. 

It's in this way that nepotism works a bit differently for some than it does for others, like Rashida Jones and Maya Rudolph. Recently, Rashida appeared on the SmartLess podcast, saying that despite being the daughter of Quincy Jones, she couldn’t fathom following in his musical footsteps. 

“My dad’s a musical genius. That’s like, the last thing I want to do, is try my hand at that,” she said. “But I love it. Like, I have a deep ache for music and I just don’t ever feel like I’m good enough to do it. Like I’ll never be good enough to do it.”

She went on to say that while she sings for fun, sang backup for Maroon 5’s first two albums and even writes music, she could never actually do what her father did, and has therefore focused her attention more on acting, writing and directing. 

And back in April, Maya Rudolph appeared on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast and discussed her parents, the legendary Richard Rudolph and Minnie Riperton. She explained that despite the level of fame her parents had, with them being singer-songwriters, it didn’t really help her in her dream of wanting to be on Saturday Night Live.

“They were musicians, they weren't actors. I wanted to go to New York, and I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. That’s a huge undertaking…I wasn’t like, ‘Oh my dad writes songs, that’s gonna make me a comedian.’ There was no direct line. I knew I had to get there myself,” she explained.

And while she could have easily name dropped her parents, there was one major reason she didn’t – and it had to do with her mother’s death. She was only six when her mom died of breast cancer in 1979 at the age of 31. 

“When you're a kid and your mom dies, you don't want people to know that,” she said. “So when I started doing SNL, people didn't really know she was my mom, and they figured it out later.”

It’s interesting to me that while Rashida and Maya deliberately distanced themselves from connections that could’ve guaranteed them anything from opportunities to success, Sabrina leaned right into her connection to her aunt, and rightfully so. She observed her, accepted the offer to spend a few nights in Nancy’s Hollywood home, and got ushered into an acting agency, despite her true dream of being a singer-songwriter.

It could be generational, but it’s not lost on me that Rashida and Maya are both biracial women, and race can absolutely inform one’s approach to “making it” in any given industry. Perhaps there was a stronger desire to make it on their own, to mitigate claims that they were shooed into the industry simply for having famous parents. I know I, personally, as a biracial person, have constantly felt pressure to prove myself, to not be regarded as a “diversity hire”.

None of this is to sh-t on Sabrina, or her success, or imply that she hasn’t worked her ass off to get where she is. But context matters so much, particularly when her fanbase is a bunch of twenty-somethings who may dream of becoming singer-songwriters one day themselves. It’s to remind them that their journey may not look the same as hers and outlining the reasons.

Beyond having a very strong Hollywood connection, Sabrina also benefits from the same kind of privilege that Miley Cyrus benefits from. I’m hesitant to call it white privilege, but it is the kind of privilege that allows both of these women to rebrand and experiment with genres in ways that other artists have a harder time doing. I wrote about Miley’s experience with genre-hopping here. 

Sabrina, too, can move between genres like country, pop, R&B and disco, and be lauded as being “excellent” at genre-hopping because she, like Miley Cyrus, is a lot less tethered to one sound than most Black musicians are. Look at the challenges even Beyoncé had with the country music industry, and in general the difficulty that other Black country artists have had in the genre.

And outside of music, Black actors are often typecast. They fill very specific roles at very specific times and are often paid a lot less than their white counterparts while doing so, more on that in this piece I wrote about Blood Diamond actor Djimon Hounsou’s frustrations with this very thing. 

These barriers, that lack of access seems to be reserved exclusively for racialised talent. And even in the face of that, they are so much more hesitant than someone like Maya Hawke, for example, to announce their connections to Hollywood and the benefits that came with it, because of the threat that they will not be seen and respected for their raw talent. But hey, I’m sure that if things don’t change, they can just “freak manifest” the visibility and respect they so desire.