Kim Petras is one powerful pop star. On tonight’s episode of Los Espookys, the blonde, Barbiecore US Ambassador Melanie Gibbons (played by Greta Titelman) has finally met her match in Secretary of State Kimberly Reynolds—her even blonder and Barbie-r boss—played by Petras, making her acting debut. “I was super nervous,” Petras admits to Vanity Fair between intermittent pulls from her vape pen in a joint Zoom interview with Titelman. “I got an acting coach to explain to me how acting works and did all this research.”

The hard work paid off, as Petras is delightful on the show as a politician with a Paris Hilton vibe, in a role that Los Espookys creators Julio Torres and Ana Fabrega wrote specifically for her. “When I got the scripts for season two, Julio mentioned to me, ‘I think we’re getting Kim Petras to be your boss,’” Titelman says. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, we wrote the part for her. We think she’s down to do it.’” But then, of course, a global pandemic occurred, creating a three-plus year gap between season one and season two of the HBO comedy, forcing Titelman to keep Petras’s involvement on the show secret from even her closest confidants, like Fire Island and I Love That for You’s Matt Rogers, a close friend and frequent collaborator. “I didn’t tell Matt. I didn’t tell any of our other friends,” says Titelman. “I was like, ‘It’s so major, I can’t spoil it.’”

It all began, as so many surprise collaborations do, backstage at a concert. “In 2019, Julio came to my show at Terminal 5 in New York—Julio and [Saturday Night Live’s] Bowen Yang,” Petras recalls. “We talked backstage. I’m a big fan of Julio and of Bowen, and we just had a good time and linked up.” Naturally, that backstage kiki led to a correspondence that set everything in motion. “A couple weeks later I got an Instagram DM like, ‘Would you ever be down to be in Los Espookys? Because we have been listening to ‘Turn Off the Light’ nonstop writing it.’”

Even though her guest spot was put on hold by the pandemic, Petras was always determined to make it happen. “[During] those two years. I was like, ‘Well, once this is over, I’m going to shoot Los Espookys. Fuck everyone.’” A fan of the show and all things Halloween-related, Petras says that she and her friends watched season one “three times over” and “are all addicted to it.” “I’m a spooky girl. I love to be spooked,” she says. “So it was kind of a no-brainer. I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”

“I didn’t want to act one day,” Petras tells VF. “I was a songwriter, studio rat my whole life.” But once she arrived on the Los Espookys set in Santiago, Chile, it clicked that the blonde and powerful political figure Torres and Fabrega wrote for her was an extension of the pop star persona she had already perfectly crafted. “Once I got there, it was like, ‘We wrote this for you,’” Petras says. “It’s kind of your stage character, just in politics. Move the stage character to politics.”

Given that one of Petras’s most beloved refrains goes, “I want all my clothes designer / I want someone else to buy ’em / If I cannot get it right now / I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it at all,” it wasn’t all that tricky to get into character. “I can be a bitch who gets what she wants onstage—that’s the persona I’ve created,” says Petras. “It was easy bringing that into Melanie Gibbons’s office and being Secretary of State.”

Titelman maintains that Petras felt like a pro on set. “Kim was so easy,” Titelman says. “I was intimidated, obviously, because I am a huge Kim fan. I was singing Kim’s songs to her on set.” (“I loved it,” chimed in Petras.) “It didn’t feel like Kim was acting for the first time,” Titelman continued. “She just immediately fit into the Los Espookys universe because she has the same sensibility, knows the same references. We’re all a part of the same kind of culture. She just got it.”

And while you might think that years of practice in front of the camera shooting music videos might have prepared Petras for her acting debut, you’d be wrong. “[It’s] way different,” Petras says. “On a music video, you’re just kind of concerned with being hot,” she says, laughing. “Sucking it in.” She demonstrates on Zoom, striking an Instagram-ready pose. “This was way more real. [I was] trying to not think about that. [You’re] just trying to talk to someone and not think that you’re on camera and watching your angles and all of that. It was way more natural because you’re really bouncing off of someone, as I did with Greta. I was a lot less concerned with being snatched.”

Being snatched might not have been Petras’s number one priority on set, but it was part of the equation. “In the office of Melanie Gibbons and Kimberly Reynolds, we are very concerned with being snatched and hot because that is half of our power,” says Titelman with mock gravity. Season two finds Titelman’s US ambassador focused on rigging the presidential election in Los Espookys’ nameless Latin American country and eventually transferring to the Miami embassy (yes, Miami). While this makes her Los Espookys’ “super-villain,” she says, it also provides a shrewd satire of American politicians and America’s long history of destabilizing Latin American countries for our own capitalist gain.

“Melanie Gibbons isn’t representing a Marjorie Taylor Greene, or even a Sarah Palin. Melanie Gibbons is representing the American ideology behind capitalism,” says Titelman. She believes Gibbons to be “party agnostic” and focused on “the simple things in life.”

“She only serves herself and her own interests, which to me is a very American thing,” Titelman says. “She just wants to go on vacation and to chill and to be hot and fun. Is that so much to ask? If she needs to ruin a couple of democracies along the way, so be it. Okay? Don’t hate the player. Hate the game, hon.”

Unfortunately for Melanie, her game is ruined when, after a day of step-and-repeats and influencing elections, Petras’s Secretary of State Kimberly Reynolds breaks the news that there is no Miami embassy. “I know it doesn’t look like it when you look at the map, but once you zoom out you will see that Miami is actually in the US. They’re connected, which we were all really surprised by,” Petras’s Kimberly Reynolds says, with comedic aplomb.

Petras says she “fell in love with” Kimberly Reynolds, but her busy career as a rising pop star makes it hard to think of more screen time. Petras, who began her career writing jingles for commercials and songs for other artists, currently has the number one song on the Billboard Global 200 with “Unholy,” her duet with Oscar-winning singer Sam Smith. “Sam’s a girlie,” Petras says affectionately. “Sam knows what’s up. Sam should be in Los Espookys.”

Like Petras’s part on Espookys, “Unholy” also originated in Instagram DMs. “We’ve been DMing for years about making a song together. And we just kind of got into the studio. I heard the song. I was immediately like, ‘This is a really special song.’ And went into the booth, kind of freestyled my part. Sam and I dialed it in and Sam was like, ‘I like this, I like this, I like this.’”

The studio where they wrote “Unholy,” as she describes it, was all “heavy-hitter producer dudes,” which for the trans Petras and the nonbinary Smith was a bit, well, queer. “It was like six producer dudes—all straight dudes,” she recalls, with a laugh. “And it was just kind of me and Sam being little sluts, writing my little slutty verses on the floor.”

If “Unholy” got you excited for more Petras, don’t worry, she’s got new music on the way. “I have a new single that you can go pre-save right now. I work with my idol, Max Martin, who’s like this pop god,” she says of the famed Swedish hitmaker. “It’s my first song with Max and with a bunch of new people I’ve never worked with.”

But if Los Espookys calls again, she’ll hop on a plane to Santiago in a heartbeat. Not that she necessarily wants to be an actor, she says. “But I want to be in Los Espookys.”