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.
