“Lemme just tell you something about Aaron,” Rachel McAdams’s Regina George tells Lindsay Lohan’s Cady Heron in the original Mean Girls movie. “All he cares about is school and his mom and his friends.” Cady’s reply is hesitant: “Is that…bad?”
Christopher Briney, 25, is on a heartthrob streak, playing Aaron Samuels in the new Mean Girls movie-musical (now streaming on Paramount+ and available to buy on digital) and Conrad (“Connie baby”) in Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty (TSITP), which is about to film its third season. Briney has gone to Milan, Paris, and New York fashion weeks, breezily wearing the clothes designers put him in. His Instagram following has grown steadily, along with his movie star tousled hair.
But lemme just tell you something about Briney. All he cares about are his friends and his girlfriend and his family. If he could make movies with friends only, he would. He could take or leave the industry trappings. He’s not on social media. He hates flying. He’s happiest when walking around his Brooklyn neighborhood, hanging out with his two roommates and playing video games, or golfing with his TSITP costar Sean Kaufman.
Briney is a cool guy, a chill guy, a guy of whom another guy might say after meeting, “He’s a good dude.” A good dude with great hair and a nice life and family and friends who love him. If he’s critical of himself, it only adds to his charm.
Briney guesses what his friends might say about him. “'Piece of sh*t, stupid, dumb, untalented,'” the 2024 New Hollywood honoree tells Teen Vogue. Then he shakes his head. “No, that's me. I try to be good to people that I care about, the people in my life. I'd like to think that's received, so maybe they'd say, ‘He's sweet.’”
It’s February, a few days out from Valentine’s Day, on a rare sunny winter's day in Brooklyn. Briney wears a beanie printed with the words “Sci Fi Fantasy,” a gray hoodie with a hunter green jacket, Adidas track pants, and sneakers, almost a typical Brooklyn transplant in his early 20s — if not for the Prada tote he tosses in the corner at the Crown Heights coffee shop where we meet.
Briney has his mom's greenish-blue eyes and big feelings, and his dad's height and humility, which can veer into self-deprecation. He carries his 6’1” height easily, folding himself onto the wooden coffee shop bench, resting his chin on his knees.
“January was a lot,” he admits. There was a whirlwind of Mean Girls press opps that consisted primarily of sitting next to his costar Reneé Rapp and playing the straight man while she was… “Unhinged?” he offers with a laugh. Let’s say, chaotically herself. “It seems like the movie's been doing all right, so I'm happy to hear that. Press stuff can be a little taxing.” But it’s all fun, it’s all cool, he’s quick to add.
And Rapp, he says, is just the greatest: “She's so funny. She's the best.” He was sad to miss the Saturday Night Live after-party she invited him to when she was the musical guest, but he’s confident she’ll be on SNL again, next time as host.
He was in LA at the time of the party — a double blow. Briney is a New York City kid, even though he’s actually from suburban, smallish-town Hartford, Connecticut. “Every time I go to LA, I'm like, jeez, I can't get out of there quick enough," he says. "The highlight is walking out of the airport, and you're like, 'Oh, my God, it's so nice here!' Then the drag is, like, everything else.” (It doesn’t help that he has intense flight anxiety; he feels extremely close to death. And don’t even get him started on the recent Alaska Airlines story involving a plane window blowing out mid-flight.)
So he’ll probably never move to LA. And why would he? All his people are here. He lives in a walk-up with two roommates (and occasional roaches). He loves having roommates; he loves to wake up and hear them talking, to rush out and ask, “What’s up?” He met both of them and his girlfriend of three years, actor Isabel Machado, while studying acting at Pace University in New York. Machado lives with TSITP season-one actor Minnie Mills, which further solidifies their expanded friend group. Briney loves a group, thrives in it.
Growing up, he played baseball for years, “but it was never, like, ‘We see the world the same,’” he says of his relationship with the team. He found that first experience of belonging, of sameness, in high school, when he took up with the theater and film kids. It was a small school. They formed a tight-knit group of six people who booked all the plays and musicals and ruled the theater scene. They’d skip cafeteria food and eat lunch in their theater-teacher’s office.
Outside of that group, Briney was a shy, insecure teenager with a competitive streak; inside that group, he could thread that competitiveness with a sense of safety, and had endless room to explore. “We all thought we were the sh*t," he says with a half smile, "probably in a really annoying way.”
Briney loves New York movies too. He’d like to make the Brooklyn version of Kicking and Screaming, with a different title though, so he doesn’t get sued. He grew up with the idea of acting as a career — both his parents went to New York as actors in the late ‘70s and early ’80s — and later moved to follow his dreams, with cutthroat New York City being a cautionary tale.
“When I told my dad that I wanted to do [acting] in college, he was like, ‘Look, I tried to do it, so I can't tell you not to or I'd be a hypocrite, but it's hard,’” he recalls. His parents met at an opera workshop, and left the city only when it became financially unsustainable to have a family there. And that was the '90s.
Says Briney, “Sometimes I'm like, ‘Am I a nepo baby?’” We litigate it: Did they do any networking for you? Did they have pull in the New York acting community? Nah. Ultimately we decide that he probably doesn’t qualify as a nepo baby, but he’s grateful to have grown up around art, with parents who love Shakespeare, to have known it was even a possibility to explore professional acting and filmmaking.
Still, he’s stuck on the question of what he got from each of his parents. “My dad's a really humble guy, and he's always like, ‘You got X, Y, and Z from your mom, and I was just there,’” Briney explains. “But he's very proud, and he sells himself short.”
Briney also talks about his sister, a hardworking law student who, he says, is way smarter than he is. And when he mentions his friends, it’s with so much admiration: “I'm very aware that all of my friends are more talented than I am,” he says. “Not even in a self-deprecating way.”
In the next month or so, Briney will leave New York for a while and head to Wilmington, North Carolina, to film the third season of The Summer I Turned Pretty. As bittersweet as it will be to leave his friends and girlfriend for a few months, there’s something so nice about being in a small town, knowing you’re 15 minutes away from anywhere you have to be.
“It kind of feels like you own the town,” he says, after I mention that on the One Tree Hill podcast, Drama Queens, the three stars Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton, and Bethany Joy Lenz often reminisce about the family vibes of living in Wilmington, away from the Hollywood machine. TSITP, coincidentally, films on One Tree Hill Way, and crew members often share stories about when OTH and Dawson’s Creek were filming. “New York is such the opposite," Briney says. "You just try to make it through, dry-heaving for most of your life.” But in a fun way, of course.
Briney just saw TSITP costars David Iacono, Sean Kaufman, and Elsie Fisher last night; he golfs and plays video games with Kaufman every week; and he’s hoping to see Lola Tung during her run of Hadestown shows on Broadway. “I love them all so much," he says. "It's not a work relationship; they're friends. I think sometimes I forget that we work together, and I'm like, 'Oh, that's right. We have a job. I've known you for two years.'” And even though Briney keeps close to the cast members who live in New York, it will still feel like a different world when he’s filming.
Over the course of two seasons, Briney has learned how to pace himself, how to keep himself on track. He knows now that sometimes, you’re just not having a good day. Maybe the lighting is wrong or you’re in a bad mood, or you have to shoot something 15 times because the wind is wonky. “[You have to] still hold onto a piece of yourself and be like, 'we're good, we're going to get through,'” he says.
That’s where a supportive crew, cast, and leadership team come in. Says Briney, “We're all close now, to this point where I can be like, 'I'm not hearing it. I need help.'”
He hasn’t read the scripts for season three yet; he’s read the books, but that might not mean much. “[Writer] Jenny [Han] is keeping it fresh and new, always, and she wants to keep it interesting and keep the audience on their toes,” Briney explains. He’s coming off of a second season that showed Conrad in a dark place, grieving the loss of his mom and his relationship with Belly, and throwing a tantrum in the car after Belly and his brother Jeremiah got together.
Briney can definitely see parts of himself, especially his younger self, in Conrad and his evolution. “I can be a piece of sh*t, too, sometimes,” he says. He’s had similar feelings as Conrad, but dealt with them differently. “Being young is a hard thing that I don't think anyone ever really forgets. The smells of a heartbreak… I can taste the memory… your body remembers.” Briney's sensory response to heartbreak is visible in the way he plays Conrad’s emotional arc: his grief, avoidance of Belly, the betrayal he feels over his brother dating his ex.
Briney recalls his first pivotal heartbreak: He was in the sixth grade, and he had a crush on a girl for a very long time, since, like, the fifth grade, which is a tenth of your life at that point. It got around to him that she liked him back, but he was shy — and also 11. What was he supposed to do with that information? One day she came up to him to inform him that she didn’t have a crush on him anymore. He can still see the scene, feel the surprise, that first jab of pain. But he had a friend by his side, he says, to clap him on the back and say, “Come on, man. Come on, we'll be okay.”
Briney doesn’t know how he’d get through something like that alone. And he later found out that friendships can have breakups, too, that sometimes compatibility can only last so long, that people can grow away from you. That sucked to realize.
“My girlfriend talks about this college friendship she had, and it was her first friend heartbreak, or friend breakup,” he says. “She was like, ‘I didn't know how much that could affect me.' Because until you're dealing with it, it's... I don't know, friendship feels more given. It almost feels more constant because, what could a friend do to you? But then you find out and you're like, ‘Oh, my God, this is worse! This is horrible.’”
It makes sense that Briney would fall in love with a friend; he values friendship above all else. He and Machado lived together platonically with two roommates in college, and then got together about a year after. Sometimes they still can’t believe it when they look at each other; they played boyfriend-and-girlfriend onstage in school, but not the real thing. Now “eighteen-year-old us would be so confused if they just looked into a window,” he says. “They'd be like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait! What's going on? What are you guys doing? Stop it!’ But it feels right. Your friends know you, and you know them."
Like several of the people on Teen Vogue's New Hollywood 2024 list, Briney is averse to social media, except for Facebook, which still gives him “Remember when this embarrassing thing happened?” memory alerts.
Briney was recently listening to an interview with Cillian Murphy, who was asked if he’d seen positive feedback, and he responded with some version of: If you believe the positive feedback, you have to believe the negative feedback too. Better to ignore it altogether — or try to — when it comes from people who don’t really know you.
“The only healthy way about it is to trust yourself as much as you can," says Briney, "or trust the people in your life.” He says he trusts himself at about a 70/30 ratio. When I ask him about a recent time when he was proud of himself or felt he had made a great decision, he gets quiet for a while before replying, “Maybe I should have said 30/70.”
Briney can’t think of the specific moment from the recent past, but he swears there is one. I get the feeling it might have been career-related, but the memory never comes to him. Instead he says that he’s never regretted going to play golf with Kaufman; he’s never regretted spending time with his girlfriend instead of going out. Maintaining friendships and relationships is his top priority, above acting. But he really wants to combine the two, “to make things with the people in my life that I love.”
He continues, “That's always been a sort of end goal for me. Like, if I can do what [John] Cassavetes did, and finance my own sh*t with people who I want to make things with — whether people like them or don't, see them or don't, I don't really care. I want to get to a point where it doesn't matter, and that's the dream.”
Briney tosses out the names of directors he admires and would love to work with: Greta Gerwig, Paul Schrader, Emerald Fennell, Cooper Raiff, Kelly Reichardt, Paul Thomas Anderson. He just wants to make good stuff with good artists, and then return home to his community.
He jiggles his knee a little as he says this, and it seems like a good time to wrap things up. As we throw away our coffee cups, he says he hopes he hasn’t embarrassed himself totally during this interview. He lights a cigarette, asks if I’m headed into the office. He points me in the direction of the right train and continues on down the block, back to the roommates and the roaches and the combination Valentines’ Day-birthday trip he has planned with his girlfriend. It’s a nice day, and everything is open to him.
Read all of our New Hollywood 2024 stories below:
- Maddie Ziegler on Dance Moms, New Movie Fitting In & Embracing Hollywood
- Ariana Greenblatt on Barbie, Borderlands, Billie Eilish & Child Stardom
- Keith Powers on Uglies, SAG Strikes, Issa Rae & Finding His Own Lane
- Christopher Briney on Reneé Rapp, Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 & Hollywood Next Moves
- Aida Osman on Rap Sh!t Cancellation, Black Stories in Hollywood & Facing Acting Fears
- Iñaki Godoy on One Piece, Latinos in Hollywood & Living His Best Life
- Megan Suri on Valentine’s Day, Bollywood & Movie Career Post Never Have I Ever
- The SAG Strike Proved How Unions Help Make Young People’s Dreams Viable
Photo Credits
Photographer Josefina Santos
Lighting Director Brian McGuffog
Gaffer Daniel Patrick
Gaffer Kane Katubig
Digitech Isan Monfort
Retouching Digital Area
Stylist Ian McRae
Stylist Assistant Auden Alblooshi
Stylist Assistant Mason Telles
Hair Stylist for Maddie Ziegler, Megan Suri Candice Birns at A-Frame Agency
Hair Stylist for Aida Osman, Ariana Greenblatt Suzette Boozer at A-Frame Agency
Groomer for Chris Briney, Keith Powers, Iñaki Godoy Melissa DeZarate at A-Frame Agency
Makeup Artist for Maddie Ziegler, Megan Suri Miriam Nichterlein at A-Frame Agency
Makeup Artist for Aida Osman, Ariana Greenblatt Rob Rumsey at A-Frame Agency
HMU Assistant Jenna Lee
Manicurist Rachel Messick
Prop Stylist Annika Fischer
Prop Assistant Elvis Barlow-Smith
Production Hyperion
Design Director Emily Zirimis
Designer Liz Coulbourn
Visual Editor Bea Oyster
Sr. Fashion Editor Tchesmeni Leonard
Associate Fashion Editor Kat Thomas
Assistant Fashion Editor Tascha Berkowitz
Video Credits
Director/Producer Logan Tsugita
Director/Producer Catherine Mhloyi
Social Video Director/Producer Ali Farooqui
Director of Creative Dev Mi-Anne Chan
Camera Op Nick Massey Ga
Social Cover Video Editor Lindsey Fink
Site Video Header Editor Crystal Waterton
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma
Executive Editor Danielle Kwateng
Features Director Brittney McNamara
Talent Director Eugene Shevertalov
Senior Culture Editor P. Claire Dodson
Entertainment News Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Contributing Editor Alyssa Hardy
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Sr. Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager Jillian Selzer
Copy Editors Dawn Rebecky and Leslie Lipton
Research Editor Cristina Sada
