Waiting For Summer with Chris Briney

Chris Briney walks us through the summers that changed his life.

Words by Adlan Jackson

Summer has a dead end job. We’re summer’s nightmare bosses, chastising it for coming too late, or too early, and when it arrives, we curse it for bringing too much of the heat we begged for. And then we only start to appreciate it once it’s gone. Worst of all, we overburden it with expectation. What summer could ever deliver on all our hopes: for transformation and new beginnings, for dreams to come true?

In the summers in Connecticut, Christopher Briney biked around, watched movies and went on camping trips with friends, in a hometown where not many kids go into the arts. “But it’s a sweet place,” he added from his apartment in Brooklyn. 

This was days before Christmas, days before Briney would go back to Connecticut to spend the holiday with his sister and dad, but we were already dreaming of the next summer. He lamented, in a Zoom call, that he hasn’t been able to have a proper New York summer, kicking it  with film school friends, two of whom he lives with, he told me, with two more just down the road. “I just want to make things with them,” he said, “whenever we do there’s just something special about it.”

“I’ve done two really cool projects on the professional level. I think both times the only way that I could think about it being better is if I could do it with the people I went to school with. This should be all of us.” 

Briney has spent his last three summers having his life changed by those two projects, which in our conversation he shorthands as “the show” and “the movie.” His role in The Summer I Turned Pretty as Conrad Fisher, the lean and brooding vertex of a teen love triangle, has earned him nearly two million followers on Instagram. And just before that, director Mary Harron plucked him from a college showcase to cast him in the arthouse independent film Dalíland as James, assistant to Salvador Dalí played by the towering and acclaimed British actor Sir Ben Kingsley. How did he get here, to the summer of his life, transformed into a heartthrob and a new, and what does he dare to hope comes next?

“I really thought I would try to play baseball in college,” Briney told me. “I took a year off, and then I went back and I was terrible.” He tried theater instead. Briney says he’s shy, but on stage quickly learned the distinctness of the two types of anxiety he experienced: the type he finds debilitating (“A lot of it is running through negative scenarios in your head. Before I enter a conversation I’ll be like, wow, this is gonna suck when they punch me in the face.”) and the type he gets on stage, which he found easier to manage. “When you have lines, things can go wrong within that, but you know what you’re signing up for. So yes, you’re doing it in front of people and that does strike a nerve of, “oh fuck, this is scary.” but it’s scary in a different way.”

The summer before his senior year, Briney enrolled in a theater program that took place on the nearby campus of Wesleyan University.“If I really enjoy this, then I do want to pursue acting,” he decided. “I didn’t really know what it would be like to study acting, but I knew I liked to be on stage.” That summer, acting was suddenly an art and not just a practice, as Briney stumbled upon that adolescent feeling of an art form–once just the name of a 45 minute class at school–unfolding into a cavernous expanse you could live and die exploring. Briney would run lines with his scene partner and pore over a script to decide how he would approach a scene rather than rely simply on recitation and improvisation. This is an approach to acting he maintains today–he sat with the scripts for the first three episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty for a month before even filming, and described trying to learn the script to Dalíland “through and through and through and through.”

But in unsuccessful auditions for schools like Julliard, Briney says “I didn’t feel encouraged to keep trying.” The only acting program to accept him was a relatively new program at Pace University that trained actors for film and television. It was a change from being on stage, but Briney found at Pace an encouraging atmosphere where he could fail and keep trying. Then, his last year of acting school was enjambed by the pandemic. In many ways, what came was the classic summer-after-college feeling, like you fell asleep on the train seat that was your life, and woke up behind the wheel of a car, an expanse ahead of you, and no knowledge of how to drive.

In reality, he was in a rented room in New York he couldn’t afford, doing nothing, as a fucking pandemic seemed to drain all hope from the future. And that summer stretched on and on for nearly a whole year. All that time for the collegiate spark to fade to the deepest kind of self-doubt. Audition after audition.

“I was doing so many auditions.” Dalíland was another. “I read the script and saw that Mary Harron was attached to it, and I was like this is sick! I’m never gonna do it, but this is so cool!” 

But Harron herself had chosen Briney from the showcase tapes at Pace. A Zoom callback followed, in a hotel room in which he was isolating from a roommate who had gotten COVID (a provision offered by the city of New York early in the pandemic). “You’re like, locked in there. They check your vitals three times a day, they don’t let you outside.” They even confiscated his booze. 

After the call that told him he got the part, a nurse arrived for Briney’s routine check, but he couldn’t catch his breath, and his heart rate wouldn’t go down. “I was like, “no, no, no, it’s not like that!”” He sat on the floor and waited for his heart rate to return to normal. The catapult had loosed. Before he left New York, he sent in an audition tape for The Summer I Turned Pretty

And then Briney was leaving the U.S. for the first time on a plane to Liverpool, and then he was there, driving on the wrong side of the road. “I can’t understand half of what people are saying because the accent’s so thick.” Alone in a foreign hotel room, surrounded by more experienced professionals, fear seized him. “The first week of shooting the movie, some nights I was curled up in a ball on the floor. I really thought about running away.” He tried to calm himself by checking out historic Beatles sites, but was thwarted by restrictions, “I could walk outside the bar the Beatles played at, but I couldn’t go in the museums.”

In the month and a half of shooting Dalíland–March and April, 2021–Briney says he was  “genuinely shaking through half of those scenes, thank God it was scene-appropriate.” What helped to calm him was his script practice (”through and through and through and through”), and that the crew, while respectful, did not baby him. ”They treat you like anybody else, and that helps you feel like you’re supposed to be there.” 

It also helped that he got the callback for the show. Briney did a Zoom chemistry read while quarantining in his apartment in Liverpool “sitting in this room I hadn’t left in five days, trying to shower and look put together.” 

“Maybe I was just riding on the high of doing something I felt was so cool, but the callbacks felt possible to me, which they hadn’t before.” 

Things started to turn around. “The day I found out I got the show was the day of the table read for the movie. So I was sitting six feet from Sir Ben Kingsley, and across from Mary Harron, and then I got back to my apartment and I had a missed call from my manager. It was a great day.” 

Then, when the show was announced, Briney suddenly gained four thousand followers on Instagram. “And that scared me.” It hit Briney all at once how big of a hit the book by Jenny Han that The Summer I Turned Pretty was based on was. “I was like damn, people are watching me. I had this character in my hand that people had distinct visions and opinions of.” But he decided, “I was so terrified by tackling the movie that I couldn’t be nervous for the show yet,” Briney said. “When I get back to the states I’ll worry about the show.” 

He got back in April, but in May he had to shoot some exteriors for Dalíland in the south of France. “They had a stand-in for me because I can’t drive manual,” he said.

In June, North Carolina, a beach town that the characters of The Summer I Turned Pretty search for freedom, that they go to to be transformed into new people. Protagonist Belly–short for Isabel and played by Lola Tung–can barely look through Conrad Fisher’s fringe of disheveled brunette hair into his aquamarine eyes without a dreamy pop song starting to play, but has deep feelings as well for Conrad’s younger brother Jeremiah. Conrad is tall, soulful, and tortured by a private tragedy–his mother’s cancer diagnosis.

Once Briney got to North Carolina, he had begun to grapple with how he should approach the character of Conrad Fisher. “For a long time I was like, how am I going to live up to everyone’s expectations? I don’t wanna let people down. I want people who like this story to enjoy watching it.” I asked Briney which of the two fears that was. “It was more the less constructive version, the social interaction fear of “what will these people think of me? Why are people on Twitter calling me ugly? How do I make these fans change their minds?” That was the first time I read an anonymous opinion about me. It took me awhile, but I was like, I gotta let go of this, I gotta do my own work. 

“And eventually we had a total fucking blast shooting that show.”

They finished shooting season 2 in Early November–Briney spent 2022’s summer working, too. But now he is at the lip of possibility. “I feel like I have some agency to like, find the direction that I want to go in next.” He smiles. “I haven’t had a summer in New York in a minute.”

Written by Adlan Jackson, Photographed by Austin Augie, Styling by Kirsten McGovern