Charli xcx is ready for her Brat era to ‘stop’

Charli xcx “wants” Brat to “stop”.

The 33-year-old pop star enjoyed meteoric success with the 2024 album and has since dived into a slate of film projects – including The Moment, a new mockumentary directed and co-written by Aidan Zamiri, inspired by Charli’s real-life Brat Tour – and is enjoying being on a different path creatively.

Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of the flick on Friday (23.01.26), she said: “Right now, I’m like — like me in the film — I’m really wanting ‘Brat’ to stop.”

She continued: “I think for all of us as artists, it’s like, you wanna challenge yourself, and you wanna totally switch the creative soup that you’re in and go and live in a different bowl for a while or whatever, you know?

“I really just want to work with these incredible directors like Aidan [Zamiri, The Moment director], Gregg Araki, Cathy Yan, like who I feel like I can just live completely different lives with.”

While she’s playing a fictionalised version of herself in the film, Charli poured from the highs and the lows she’s experienced in her real-life career.

She explained: “I’m obviously quite related to my character, so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from.

“I would like to think I’m not as much of a nightmare as Charli in the film, but my real managers are in the audience, and they probably know the true answer to that. And I know that sometimes I do give them a bit of a hard time, and I think for me those real spiral moments that you see in the film, I have been there. I think I am, as an artist, quite a volatile person… I’m nice too. I’m nice, right?”

Charli added: “Having been in the music industry since I was 16, I’ve gone through various different stages of my career where I’ve felt on top of the world, where I felt like an absolute piece of s***, I’ve gone through it all. And I’ve also met different versions of like all of the characters within this film.

“I’ve met the people who are truly kind of like rooting for you no matter what, even if you are an a**hole. I’ve met the people who are in it to be close to the artist. I’ve met the sort of people who are so like, ‘We totally get you’ and they really don’t. I’ve met all of them, so I think for me I’ve had a lot of practice reacting to all of those different kinds of characters in my real life. I was just drawing from that, really.”