Long before he became Conrad Fisher, the Internet’s summer boyfriend, Christopher Briney was auditioning for his first-ever part in Daliland, an indie drama about Salvador Dalí’s late years. It was February 2021, and Briney was filming his callback in a hotel room paid for by the New York State government as part of a program to protect residents who’d been exposed to the coronavirus. It felt less like Eloise and more like Room.
“It was really brutal,” Briney, now 27, says of quarantining with the only one of his three then roommates who hadn’t gotten sick. “We brought a bunch of booze, because we were like, ‘What are we gonna do? Drink and watch movies?’ They confiscated all of it.” They even took Briney’s knitting needles.
Briney’s circumstances have markedly improved since then. He spoke to me from the Plaza hotel, where he was staying during a press tour for the third and final season of the feverishly popular series The Summer I Turned Pretty, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video on July 16. He was also preparing for his theatrical debut in the Off Broadway comedy Dilaria, now running at the Daryl Roth Theatre through August 8.
Briney, who’s been a New York City resident for nine years, currently lives in Brooklyn with his two best friends from college. His childhood was spent just a couple of hours from the big city, in Naugatuck, Connecticut, where his parents moved after working for years as “grinding actors” in the city. As a kid, Briney never dreamed of following in their footsteps. “I didn’t want to do anything in the arts at all,” he says. “I really wanted to be a baseball player.”
That changed when he attended the Waterbury Arts Magnet School, where he had to take mandatory dance, visual-arts, and acting classes. “I had so much fun doing that,” he tells me. “It sort of woke up this itch.” After high school, he pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting at Pace University, graduating in 2020.
Less than a year later, Briney booked the role in Daliland, where he starred as James, a young gallery assistant, alongside Ben Kingsley as Dalí. It was during the early stages of production, at a table read, that he learned he had also landed a role in The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Adapted from Jenny Han’s young-adult book trilogy of the same name, the show follows Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) and her tumultuous love triangle with the two Fisher brothers: Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), the fun-loving, fratty younger brother, and Conrad, the brooding, high-achieving older one.
After the first season premiered, in 2022, Han’s original book series shot to the top three slots of the Amazon best-seller list. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift’s 2019 Lover album, songs of which were featured several times throughout the season, re-entered the Billboard Top 40 chart. Today, the tag #TeamConrad has more than 200,000 posts on TikTok, primarily montages of Briney’s character and fan debates arguing about whether Belly and Conrad (or their couple’s tag #Bonrad, with more than 86,000 posts) should be the ultimate endgame.
Briney, who has 3.4 million followers on Instagram, says he tries not to get caught up in the frenzy of the Internet discussions. “I’ve learned that it’s healthier for me to try and keep my distance from social media. I think it can be consuming.” Mostly, he says, “I love having an audience that cares. It’s gotten us three seasons of television, which is a blessing.” The show’s popularity also helped him secure the role of Aaron Samuels in the 2024 musical film adaptation of Mean Girls, starring Reneé Rapp, Busy Philipps, and Tina Fey.
Briney once again plays the love interest in Dilaria, Julia Randall’s biting reflection on a generation shaped by social media and true crime. The play stars Ella Stiller (Ben Stiller’s daughter) as the titular character, who stages her own death for attention. Briney plays Noah, Dilaria’s situationship and unofficial therapist.
It’s Briney’s first time in a stage production. “There’s so much trial and error in theater,” he says. “It’s fun to stay with something and make discoveries about this character and sort of slowly let the pieces fall into place.”
On September 17, Briney and fans will say a final good-bye to Conrad. “I’m excited to hopefully do new and different things and meet people and challenge myself in different ways,” he says. “But I’m also going to miss the people that are on this show.... This is a really weird experience, but we’ve been able to share that with each other.”
As for how things pan out for Conrad, Briney gives nothing away. But, as he assures me, “I’m Team Conrad.”
New episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s third season will be released on Prime every Wednesday until September 17. Dilaria is on at the Daryl Roth Theatre, in New York, until August 8
Paulina Prosnitz is a Junior Editor at air mail
