Chloe Bailey is scared of the dark. “I always sleep with a little night light on,” she says. “And I listen to music, TikTok, and meditation sounds. You have to distract your mind so it doesn’t create its own story, right?”
Smiling serenely via video link from her home in Los Angeles, the 25-year-old pop star/actor/music producer appears so unshakeably self-possessed, it’s hard to imagine anything rattling her. But she is, she says, “the world’s biggest scaredy cat”: “I’ve never watched a horror film in my life. And any time my friends have convinced me to go onto haunted house fairground rides, I have just hidden my head in somebody’s jacket and looked down at my feet the whole time.” She shudders. “I stay away from anything frightening – and yet look where I’ve ended up!”
Bailey is talking about her terrifying turn in Joshua John Miller’s psychological spooker The Exorcism, which stars Russell Crowe as a troubled actor cast in a remake of William Friedkin’s classic 1973 horror The Exorcist. Miller is the son of the late Jason Miller, who played one of the priests in the original film, and his new script plays on the urban legends around the “cursed” 1970s set, which was plagued by unsettling accidents, including a fire, a crew member severing his thumb, and two cast members seriously injuring their spines while faking demonic possession.
These rumours were stoked by Friedkin, who hinted at supernatural causes and even asked a real priest to exorcise the set. On its initial release, some audience members believed that the demonic force portrayed in the film had passed through the celluloid into cinemas across America. There were reports of movie goers vomiting and fainting at screenings.
The Exorcism makes hay with all the old Exorcist lore: lights crash down from the rigging and the sadistic director (played by Adam Goldberg) toys with his cast’s unstable emotions. But the new film also addresses the social conservatism of the old film, in which old white men shout down the sexually explicit devil out of a young girl. In a recent interview with The Au Review, Miller said: “After Trump got elected in America, it just seemed like straight white men were going crazy. We wanted to do an exorcism movie, and we thought, let’s not have it be a hysterical woman saved by a man. Why can’t we make a man possessed and be saved by two lesbians?”
Did Miller pitch the film to Bailey this way? “No!” she laughs. “And did we really SAVE the crazy white guy, hmm?” She grins. “But as a black woman, I read the script and thought: ‘Fuck, YEAH. I am down to do this’.” Although she stresses that her main motivation was “less about being a black woman and more about being a person conquering my fears”.
Bailey has spent the past decade repeatedly “throwing myself into the ring of fire”. She has been famous since she was just 13, when she and her younger sister Halle (star of Disney’s 2023 live action remake of The Little Mermaid) began uploading their own songs to YouTube in 2012 before being signed by Beyoncé (as Chloe x Halle) in 2015.
Since then she’s been a beguiling presence on screen and record – her wide smile and broad, gospel-indebted vocal range opening the door to a restless intelligence. In 2023 film Praise This, she was “twerking for the lord” as a gospel singer who “doesn’t have a relationship with God” and in 2023 Prime Video’s comedy/horror series Swarm, she helped ask difficult questions about the toxic fan culture stoked by the internet. “I use social media as a tool to connect with fans who appreciate me and my work,” she says today. “But I have also learned it’s okay to use the lock button.” When she encounters “bullies with horrible things to say”, she has learned to think: “Why are you critiquing my life instead of living yours?”
As a girl who grew up in Atlanta singing in her nana’s church choir and still sings about her deep personal connection to God in her music, did Bailey have any qualms when it came to making a film about Satanic forces? “No,” she says, “because I am covered by the blood of Jesus and I had sage with me. Even on the set they had sage sticks burning. I stayed ‘prayed up’ and I’m glad I made it through all right.”
But there must have been some part of her that couldn’t quite believe she’d ended up thrashing around on a bed yelling: “Fuck you, Priest!”? She laughs. “Oh yes, I know right?! Oh yeah! I couldn’t rehearse that part. Not even the writhing and contorting. I had to wait until it was time to do what I had to do. I didn’t want to overdo it, or freak myself out before I needed to. Once they yelled action I just had to lose myself in that moment. I thought: forgive me God!”
I’m slightly surprised to hear that Bailey puts her faith in burning herbs as well as Christianity. Then again she also believes in astrology – reminding me she’s a Cancer – and the mishmash of beliefs do seem to be keeping her together. She’s spoken out about her struggle with depression in recent interviews and today she’s proud to tell me about the internal “balance” she’s finally finding. Last year Bailey began eating chicken again after 11 years of being vegan. Does she feel any guilty about that? “No. I will just say: ‘Thank you, chicken.'”
I wonder if she’d have dodged her “dark times” if she’d spent her childhood out of the spotlight. “I’m gonna be honest,” she says, “any time I see a talented kid who’s amazing at what they do I think: ‘Shit, I hope they’re gonna be okay.’ And the more perfect they are, the more I feel: ‘Ugh.’ Because I’ve witnessed that first hand. I know everything it entails and some of us don’t make it out okay as we all have seen.”
She also says that going through child stardom with her “mini-me” Halle meant she “didn’t have to walk that journey alone”. Although as the older sibling, she also felt a responsibility to protect Halle. “When it comes to me I will take some crap,” she says. “But if anyone tries to lay a finger on my sister, I WILL bite them!”
The Bailey sisters both began acting as young children, appearing in commercials and films. Chloe was five when she appeared in the 2003 musical comedy The Fighting Temptations starring Beyoncé and Cuba Gooding Jr. In 2012, both sisters appeared as choir members in Disney’s Let It Shine. But it was in ABC’s teen comedy drama series Grown-ish (2018-2024) that the Bailey sisters achieved mainstream recognition, dropping their Grammy-nominated debut R&B album – The Kids Are Alright – shortly after the show’s first season began.
Today Chloe confidently reminds me that she and her little sister have producer credits on both their Chloe x Halle albums, and she has produced both of her own solo albums: In Pieces (2023) and Trouble in Paradise (due out later this year). “I’m a huge nerd,” she says. “In school I loved science and math. When people asked what I wanted to do when I grew up I would say: ‘I want to be a quantum physicist.’ So don’t get fooled by the cute outfits and the glam, because there is a TEAM helping me with that. The stuff in the studio is where it’s all me, when the analytical side of my mind comes into play.”
Doesn’t she find it frustrating when people don’t realise she’s the one at the controls, though? “It’s fun to be underestimated,” she says. But she’s also concerned that only 6.5 per cent of the songs that made the Billboard charts in 2023 were produced by women. How does she think the music industry should go about encouraging more women to take up space behind the mixing desk? “Hmm,” she mulls. “I would say: make the rooms less intimidating. But we as women, we can conquer anything and it’s nothing new for us to have to prove ourselves and work 10 times harder to get even half of the recognition.”
She does think it’s essential “for the women already in those spaces to elevate other women. There are so few positions that you can get territorial because it’s such a competitive space. But you have to put our money where your mouth is”. On that score, she gives a shout-out to Ariana Grande. “I have to give kudos to her for putting the mainstream spotlight on [British artist and audio tech pioneer] Imogen Heap. Ariana opened the minds of a new generation to Imogen’s genius and also wore the Mi.Mu gloves [which allow singers to add effects like harmonies and loops to vocals with hand gestures] that Heap helped develop on her tour. Very cool tech.”
Bailey says that “work makes me happy”. But a therapist recently forced her to face up to the fact that she uses it as a distraction from her problems. “I would run to work and as long as my mind was busy I was okay,” she says. “But I was working my body to the ground. I didn’t realise until I started losing a little bit of hair.”
She had been cheated on by boyfriends – she recently told the Zach Sang Show about finding another woman’s eyelash extensions on her shower floor and collecting evidence until she “couldn’t be gaslit”. She felt “overly criticised” by music critics. And she was tired of turning the other cheek. But she didn’t always confide in friends and family about her wobbling mental health; she assumed they would decode her lyrics. It took time for her to realise she had to spell her feelings out more directly – after which she realised she had all their support.
She tells me she still has “days when I don’t want to talk to anybody. Mood swings”. But she adds, smiling widely, “I’m growing into my confidence, on the inside and out.”
The Exorcism is in cinemas now