It was a dark Saturday night on Manhattan’s Lower East Side last month, and Saturday nights can be pretty dark, but Sabrina Brier was warming up the crowd in a rhinestone necklace and strapless pants on stage at a basement comedy club called Caveat. .
“You’re the fat, I’m the microwave,” he said.
The joke passed quickly, but the metaphor lingered in the air. After several years in show business, Ms. Brier, 28, found success on the then-social media platform TikTok. She has more than 400,000 subscribers and a large fan base that watches, likes and shares her videos, many of which parody the life of a somewhat privileged young woman and her volatile self-confidence, which oscillates between urban glitz and secure comfort. from the suburbs. . (“See that angle? Perfect for pumpkin,” she said in a post about recovering from fall, a favorite season of “mainstream” white women. Ithe architect is to blame! “)
Ms. Brier specializes in images pitted against often obnoxious characters with a sly swagger, a jovial rubber body, and catchphrases like “kill me queen” and “I got you.” repeated for effect. Most recently, she subverted the Get Ready With Me (GR.WM) genre in equal parts by using face makeup, adding beauty products, and sharing women in America.
This is GR.WM’s view: “The girl who bullied you in high school is trying to be an influencer.”
In a five-part series about “The Very Passive and Aggressive Roommate,” Ms. Brier pretends not to mind taking out the trash when she’s not on her date; implements a rule prohibiting inviting people on weekends; complains that his roommate comes home at 3:27 a.m.; forces that roommate to renew the lease and then welcomes the guest into the “common area.” (The first three videos each received millions of views.) Ms. Brier’s real-life roommate, Alice Duchene, an intensive care nurse, often sits motionless behind the camera.
The two women live in a small two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, next to the CitiBikes rack (Ms. Brayer also sent a CitiBike poser, which looks like “over there!”). One floor below the character he played in one of his most famous videos, he invites visitors to climb six flights of stairs in a building he considers luxurious: “It’s worth it! Come on!”
Eleven days before her cautionary comedy show, Ms. Brier told her origin story, sitting in the kitchen of her apartment, in front of untouched cookies, under a collection of paintings by her grandmother.
Her mother, Susan Sinoman, is a playwright, and now Ms. Brier’s father, a cardiologist, is engaged in a feminist retelling of the legend of King Arthur, from whom she was divorced when she was 5. “Very kind,” said Mrs. Brier. “No big drama.”
She has an older sister, Gabrielle, who is now a producer, and when they were kids, they were obsessed with Disney Channel, performing a modern Cinderella – “it’s like a Britney Spears concert instead of a ball” – and later “rom-com girlie movies” like Clueless and Mean Girls. .
Ms. Brier was in the sixth grade when she first got her Verizon Chocolate phone. “We were the AIM generation,” he said, never dreaming that the phone would one day be a portal to everything. He attended Amity High School, where he won first place for his monologue The Taming of the Shrew in a Shakespeare competition, not knowing that comedy was his winning strategy. “Look, boys were supposed to have character, right? The boys were the class clowns. She attended Smith College, an all-female liberal arts college, where she majored in acting and took improvisation classes.
“It was always easy to identify him as a doer,” Ms. Sinoman said by phone. “She wasn’t an extrovert, but half of Sabrina was always looking out the window, and other realities entered the reality we had with her.”
After graduation, Ms. Brier worked in talent management for two years, then took a position as a writer’s room assistant on For Life, an ABC drama about a wrongful conviction. prison to free himself. “Anything that makes me cry is crazy,” Ms. Brier said. “Every actress has a sad girl inside, and that’s definitely me.”
A season later, Covid arrived. Restless in quarantine, he started posting videos on Instagram, one of which was picked up by popular sports blog Barstool. But that was before Reels. “It would be a little bit blurry, it didn’t translate, I didn’t understand it and I felt it. old,” he said. He then posted several on TikTok, including one that falsely referenced Houston Street in New York City, which is pronounced How-ston as in Houston. Boom.
As Ms. Brier expanded from the one-note Connecticut transplant to New York City to the sophisticated jazz of friendship, especially female friendship, she became recognized in restaurants and on sidewalks. Platform queen Dixie D’Amelio named her favorite account to follow. Model Emily Ratajkowski used Ms. Brier’s voice for a video about “seeming.” Playwright Jeremy O. Harris added it to his “Coronavirus Mixtape” records, Carousels. Videos and memes posted by Mr. Harris during the lockdown.
Ms. Brier’s viral fame has attracted the attention of brands who pay her to write comics featuring their products, which is how she now makes a living. The girl who once made a video about being the “PERFECT Metro Girl” who couldn’t swipe her MetroCard is now hired to sell Subway sandwiches. (Other sponsorships include Bumble, Uno the Board Game, and Mirrored Cell Phone Cases.)
But he dreams of owning and hosting his own TV show. In May, he’ll play two nights as a character at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where it’s hard to find a character. Ms. Brier is currently auditioning for other roles on behalf of the Creative Arts Agency.
In this city, you still need ambition and an algorithm.
“People say, ‘Wow, this is all happening,'” Ms. Brier said. “And I said, ‘These are just things that work the way I try to make them work. This is not accidental.
Tech
All news on the site does not represent the views of the site, but we automatically submit this news and translate it through software technology on the site rather than a human editor.
