Rebel Wilson announces massive new career move with record label Rebellionaire Is there anything this Aussie celebrity can’t do?
Actress, director, clothing designer, dating app founder – Rebel Wilson is a woman of many talents. But just when you thought she couldn’t possibly add any more detail to her already-packed resume, you can add one more thing: record label owner.
The 43-year-old Pitch Perfect star has just inked a deal with Warner Music for her own label, called Rebellionaire. “Take the ‘b’ out of billionaire and replace it with an ‘r’ for Rebel,” she quipped to Deadline when making the announcement.
The first release on the record label will be the soundtrack to her feature directorial debut, a musical called The Deb, which begins filming in Australia later this year.
The record label deal came about when Warner Music studio executives heard some samples of the music from the upcoming film. Wilson said the soundtrack to The Deb would “never be bought by Disney,” because it contains some spicy lyrics, including one song called “F*** My Life.”
She added it would feature a mix of ballads, a cappella songs, pop songs and some “hip-hop elements”. The soundtrack is expected to drop at the same time as the film’s release next year. The Deb was originally a stage musical written by Hannah Reilly which won the 2019 Rebel Wilson Comedy Commission, a scholarship program aimed at encouraging the talent of young female writers at the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).
“Basically, one young person wins it and then I mentor them for a year,” Wilson told Deadline. “And as part of it, they have to pitch a show and write the show and hopefully finish it by the end of the year.” The first winner of the award was for another musical called Fan Girls, which got Wilson thinking about how these musical theatre productions could potentially become movie productions.
She signed a contract with ATYP that would allow her to identify productions that to came her via the scholarship that were worthy of further development for theatre, TV or film. Wilson, who now lives in LA with her fiancé Ramona Agruma, said the arrangement would allow her to regularly “go back to Australia and create some Australian movies, because I hadn’t shot a movie there for 12 years”.
The last movie Wilson filmed in Australia was A Few Best Men (2011), which also starred Elizabeth Debicki (The Crown, The Great Gatsby) and the late Olivia Newton-John. It’s not known what other musical projects Wilson has her eye on for Rebellionaire – so watch this space.
