“Do you want me to laugh on cue?” asks Cat Burns, drolly. “Just tell me when.”
Sure enough, as the camera’s shutter starts to click, click, click, Burns effortlessly glides from pose to pose, switching seamlessly between warm smiles and straight-faced enigmatic eye contact. Then, as soon as the camera cuts, and with her trademark dry humour, she playfully drops her arms and takes a breath, as if returning to factory settings.
For those who haven’t been on a set before, this isn’t about being fake — it’s a sign of a pro at work. Photographers need their muses to switch from one mood to another (and back again) in mere seconds. It’s a skill Burns has mastered… and one that, as the entire nation saw, made her an excellent Traitor. Her comedic timing and razor-sharp wit, combined with her shy charm, make her instantly likeable — and yet, for a TV show about deception, suitably hard to read.
At the time of writing, it’s been just over two weeks since the finale of the wildly successful first iteration of The Celebrity Traitors. Burns has long had a dedicated following, but even for those of us who were fans before she hit prime time, it was a thrill to see her suddenly blow up and gain mainstream popularity. In the weeks since, she’s surpassed a million followers on Instagram; her second album, How To Be Human, has racked up over 20m streams on Spotify, reached number five in the UK’s Official Albums Chart, and topped the Official Album Downloads Chart; and she’s been a regular on every major red carpet going.
When we sit down at the end of the shoot, with Burns back in the cosy grey tracksuit she arrived in, twists pulled up into a bun, she tells me that these whirlwind few weeks have been intense but exciting. “My fanbase has grown a lot and it’s opened me up to a new audience,” she says. “Everyone has been really sweet. I’m still just taking it all in.”
And there’s a lot to take in. More than 11 million viewers tuned in to watch the show, rivalling England’s victory in the Women’s Euro 2025 final. Being skyrocketed into a household name overnight must be pretty overwhelming, particularly after a year of such intense highs and lows, love and loss. So how has it felt on the inside, and what comes next?
A musical upbringing
Burns is a millennium baby — and, born in June, a Gemini — raised in Streatham, south London, a place she credits with “teaching [her] grit and how to stand up for [herself]”. She grew up for the most part with her mum, a nurse and foster carer of Jamaican descent, and her sister, who’s six years older than her, after her parents split up when she was seven years old.
Burns remembers being introverted from a young age. “As a child, I was very shy, very quiet,” she says. But it was music that gave her a voice. “I loved singing and I loved the arts. [My mum was a singer], so I was always singing around the house and she was singing with me. It quite quickly rubbed off on me.” (If you’re a real stan, you’ll remember Burns’ mum popping up in her early TikTok videos to sing new tracks alongside her.) “I probably knew I wanted to be a musician when I was around 12 or 13,” she says, “but I didn’t know it could be a job.” That all changed when she heard about The Brit School, the performing arts programme that’s nurtured the likes of Amy Winehouse, FKA Twigs, and Katy B. “A friend mentioned the school and all the different people who’d gone there, like Adele and Jessie J, and I was like, ‘Oh wow, and it’s in Croydon — this is great!’.” After attending the open day and falling in love with it, she auditioned and, just like that, she was in.
It was a turning point for Burns, who describes herself as “not the most academic of people”. “Brit’s really fun,” she says, curling her legs beneath her and lounging back on to her heels. “I was very happy there. It’s a world within itself — you get to wear your own clothes, there’s no school bell. It’s about learning how to manage your time and how to be professional.”
When she was just 16, Burns put out her first EP, 2016’s Adolescent, which she recorded with a fellow student who had a studio in his garden shed. “I just really wanted to put out a body of work and then run around the school and tell people they should listen to it!” And that’s exactly what she did, promoting a release show in the process, too.
From ‘no’ to Go
Burns spent the next few years honing her sound, steadily releasing singles and another EP, earning money by busking on London’s South Bank. Then, during the pandemic, she started drumming up a wider fanbase by posting covers and original songs on TikTok.
Although she wrote her first major hit, “Go”, in 2018, it didn’t take off for another four years — but when it did, it really did. “It felt very surreal,” says Burns of the single’s rise (and now-platinum status). “All I’ve ever wanted to do is make people feel seen and less alone through music, so seeing so many people resonate with the song and give it their own meaning, it’s hard to put that feeling into words.”
What was it like when she started getting recognised in public? “It wasn’t long after things began to go back to normal after lockdown, so it was a sudden change,” she adds. “It will always be strange because I’m just… me?” Overnight fame didn’t change much else for Burns, though, who stayed living with her mum and sister. “Having them around kept life feeling normal.”
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. As with her good friend and fellow Brit School alumna Rachel Chinouriri, execs tried to pigeonhole her into R&B despite being an indie pop artist, just because she’s Black. This was something Chinouriri spoke about in her own Cosmo cover interview last year — and for Burns, it was a hard relate. “I had to keep being like, ‘No, I’m pop’,” she says. “But when ‘Go’, which is so obviously a pop song, went as viral as it did, it helped stop those conversations. I’d had a lot of nos, but once I built my following, people were like, ‘Okay, actually we do see what you’re doing and we get it’.”
It’s one of the many ways Burns has had to fight to make a historically homogenous music industry work with her, rather than against her. Diagnosed with ADHD in 2021 after her girlfriend at the time suggested she might have it, Burns then received an autism diagnosis in 2023. She has talked openly about the signs she had both — difficulty with time management, impulsiveness, feeling emotions intensely, a need for routine, and overthinking social interactions, particularly eye contact — and admits it’s taken time to juggle the demands of a job often at odds with her personal needs. “I love my own company and I love to be by myself [which you don’t often get when you’re working]. The industry is also very last-minute, which clashes very much with neurodivergency. But knowing that my brain works in a different way, I can learn to work with it instead of resisting it.”
Today is a prime example — pictures, videos, a bustling and busy environment, and then chatting with me at the end of the day — it’s a hectic situation for anyone. But throughout, Burns makes time for herself, sitting quietly on her phone during downtime, singing softly to a SZA soundtrack while we shoot, and emanating a calm self-confidence. In short, she’s warm, charismatic, and polite, but she’s not afraid to put herself first. “[The best advice I’ve had is that] ‘no’ is a full sentence. If you don’t want to do something, don’t do it. No one can make you do something you don’t want to do.”
It’s a recurring theme throughout our interview: when I ask Burns about her touring mantra, how she navigates the push-pull of her public vs private life, and when we talk about the pressure to bend her music into a particular genre. Her mentality is, as she tells me with a nonchalant shrug: “You just say ‘no’.” It’s admirable — if more difficult than she’s maybe letting on — and it’s this maturity, combined with her honesty and vulnerability, that fans like me fall in love with IRL and through her music.
All this love
Her latest release, How To Be Human, is a bright indie-pop album rich with storytelling, and perhaps her most raw and candid yet. It details everything from the grief of losing her grandad in 2024, the heartbreak of her long-term relationship ending, the guilt of moving forwards amid it all, and the joy of falling in love again (more on that later). It features voice notes of her crying in the depths of her grief (both bereavement and heartbreak) and gut-wrenchingly relatable lyrics such as, ‘Why do break-ups have to always break you too? Is there a future where I’m over you?’
It’s fitting, in many ways, that Burns is the cover star for this issue of Cosmopolitan, our Love Issue. She frequently cites a paraphrased quote by Andrew Garfield, which he shared during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2021 following the death of his mum, as the inspiration for How To Be Human: that grief is love with no home. And, as anyone who’s experienced it will know, there’s perhaps no stronger love than that which comes through grief. “That video helped me realise that what I was feeling was love,” she reflects, “and it helped me to be able to write about it because I wanted the songs about my grandad to feel uplifting and joyful, emotional and sad, but also with a bit of hope, sombreness, and acceptance. I think that’s what grief is, within the midst of deep sadness.”
Most of us still don’t know how to talk about grief or support a friend or even family member who’s going through it, which means our grieving processes tend to be so private. On both her album — ‘I’ve been going out more / I’ve been seeing friends… Don’t need to pretend to hide my feelings’ — and TikTok, Burns has made an effort to show what grief really looks like: you cry and question how the earth can keep spinning without your loved one in it, but ultimately life has to go on. You see friends, you work out, you go to festivals and on holiday, you go to work, but your grief is always with you. “Sometimes it’s easier not to speak about it because you get choked up,” says Burns. “But it’s important to talk because those who have also experienced grief understand that it changes. Every year that goes by, you experience a new level of it. As time goes on, the initial hit of losing them [diminishes] and grief starts to show itself differently.”
It’s been three years since my own dad died, aged just 62, a world-shattering loss that I’m still coming to terms with, and which has the awful habit of piercing my reality at seemingly arbitrary moments. One of those was first listening to Burns’ album opener, “Come Home”, which leans into her spirituality and the idea of God calling her grandad home — and which, as I tell her, I find I have to skip as the emotion it brings up in me is still so raw. “As soon as you put out art, it’s not yours any more, it’s everyone else’s,” she says. “And everyone else will immediately think of whoever it is for them in their life, which is why I make music: to help people.” Putting her grief into words helps Burns, too. “It’s very cathartic. It helps get your thoughts away from just swirling in your head.”
Is it nerve-racking to be so vulnerable? “Yeah, but if I wasn’t nervous, I probably wasn’t being as vulnerable as I could have been.”
Bringing this vulnerability to the stage, Burns is heading out to tour the album in April, on an eight-night run of shows across the UK, culminating in a headline show at Brixton’s O2 Academy — her dream venue. “When I started everything, I always said, ‘If I can sell out Brixton, anything else I do in my career will be a bonus’.” It’s all a bonus from here, then. There’s something else special about that night, too. “It’s on 19 April, and 20 April is when my grandad passed away, so it feels like a full-circle moment; like it’s meant to be.”
It’s been bittersweet to celebrate her growing success without some of those she loves around her, but Burns has welcomed it all with open arms. “When big life achievements happen you get a new wave of grief, but I’ve accepted that [in those moments] I’ll have big waves of emotions. If I cry, I cry. If I don’t, I don’t. But I let myself feel it. You can be happy and sad.”
Something about her
The past year has been a momentous one for Burns, full stop — releasing a new album to critical acclaim, buying her own flat and, of course, a starring role on the UK’s most popular reality show. It’s an experience she says has resulted in genuine, lasting friendships. “It’s a nice little family,” she says of her Traitors co-stars. “Me and Lucy are really close, and obviously me and Alan. I love Celia. Jonathan. Niko... me and him get on really well. There’s a real bond that we shared just by being big kids and filming the show. We all chat in a Traitors group chat, and tell each other what we’re doing.”
So has she got the reality TV bug? “Nope!” she says, before I’ve even finished asking the question. “That’s me. One and done. Finished. I loved the show, I’m so glad I did it, but that’s all I’ll do.” She adds with a laugh: “I still want to be a singer! But if the side quest was interesting enough, then I’d do it.” What kind of side quest might that be? “Who knows? I can’t tell you that!” she sing-song yells. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
Away from the spotlight, Burns is a self-professed homebody — “I just sort of like to exist with my dog” — and her circle is “small” but tight-knit. “Most of my close friends I’ve had since Brit school, or before,” she says. “We just locked in and stayed together. They’re very silly and funny. We’re always laughing at something; we’re never serious.”
And it seems that trusted inner circle has grown by one of late as, amid it all, Burns has been quietly, privately, falling in love. At first, her socials were peppered with cryptic captions and glimpses of a rumoured partner, which sent fans slightly wild trying to play detective over who it might be. The tug-of-war between sharing more and keeping her ‘private life private’ has played out on her TikTok quite literally since, with a post promoting her single “There’s Just Something About Her” jokingly showing Burns trying to pull her love into the frame.
But, despite pictures becoming increasingly candid recently, one thing’s for sure — she’s certainly not feeling the pressure of a red-carpet hard launch any time soon. “I just choose what I want to say,” she replies matter-of-factly when I ask how she manages that balance between personal and public, particularly as such an emotionally open lyricist. “I just do things when I feel ready, if I want to, and if it feels right.” She admits she is a romantic, though. “Classic balloons in a hotel room with fun petal stuff. That’s my bag.”
Regardless of who Burns is or isn’t dating, it’s clear her greatest love story is with herself — and post-Traitors, it’s self-care that’s been her biggest priority. “I don’t like to resist my feelings and I’m really mindful of not over-exerting myself and causing burnout, especially since my autism diagnosis,” she says. “Once I’ve passed a point, it takes a really long time for me to recharge and be okay with coming back into society again.”
This was why the decision to postpone her tour, from November 2025 to April 2026, came about. “I was conscious of my diary being really hectic, everything being everywhere, and not having any time to breathe and mentally recharge, so I was like, ‘It needs to be rescheduled so I can give everyone the best version of myself and put on the best show possible’.”
“It’s important to have your non-negotiables,” she continues. “You have to make sure that you’re looking after yourself because you have to give so much of yourself in this industry. You need to pour into you, too.”
When I ask what brings her the most joy in navigating life as a Black, queer, and neurodivergent woman (or, as she calls herself, “a quadruple homicider”), she answers simply: “That I’m all four. I’m really lucky that with my neurodivergency, I’m able to do my special interest as a job. So I really care about it and it brings me a lot of joy. And being queer, Black, and a woman is just amazing and so fun. I wouldn’t want to be anyone else and I wouldn’t want to be any different from how I am. I’m really comfortable and happy in myself and my skin.”
How To Be Human is out now and you can catch Cat on tour this April.
Photography: Adama Jalloh; Styling: Rebecca Jane Hill; Editor in Chief: Claire Hodgson; Art Director: Alex Hambis; Entertainment Editor (Special Projects): Nicola Fahey; Make up: Daniela Alves; Make up Assistant: Shirley Anne Dapaah; Fashion Assistant: Charlotte Malley; Photo Assistants: Rami Hassen, Myles Bailey; Photo Intern: Ananda Walters; Video Production: Megan Beattie; Video Interview: Minah Shannon; Video Assistant: Jaff Shubber-Barton; Production: Beverley Croucher
