The Summer Chris Briney Said Goodbye

“I have such a hard time doing press,” Chris Briney says midinterview. We’re sitting on a couch in a studio in Brooklyn, and Briney just wrapped up a photo shoot, which involved braving the 95-degree heat wave and posing on this very couch. It’s mid-June, just about a month ahead of the premiere of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s third and final season.

Briney’s soft-spoken words aren’t a rebuff as much as a confession. (And to be clear, Briney doesn’t seem bad at press.) The actor has been in the public eye — and the subject of hundreds of thousands of fan edits — since landing his breakout role as Conrad Fisher in The Summer I Turned Pretty. The show, based on Jenny Han’s bestselling book trilogy, has taken over the Internet since the YA series first aired on Prime Video in 2022.

Set in the fictional town of Cousins Beach, the story follows Belly Conklin (played by Lola Tung) as she navigates her teenage years, grief, and first love(s). She’s caught between her feelings for two siblings she’s known since childhood: the moody older brother (and her forever crush), Conrad, and the sunshiney younger brother, Jeremiah Fisher (played by Gavin Casalegno).

At 27, Briney is past his own years of teenage melodrama. “When I was 17, these things hit so hard. Holding someone’s hand felt like falling off a cliff. That’s been key for me to find my way into the story.” But despite the high-stakes storylines, he stays grounded. “On our first season, we had a director who would remind us, ‘Guys, it’s a TV show. We don’t need to be at each other’s throats. We don’t need to be seeking perfection.’” He found those words of wisdom helpful. “It just rationalized how lucky we are just to be here, making a TV show.”

In between takes, the set had a summer camp vibe — and filming on location in the beach town of Wilmington, North Carolina, certainly helped. Throughout Season 1, they’d play chess during off times. (“I f*ck with chess.”) For Season 2, the cast swapped chess for Codenames. By Season 3, they had transitioned to golf. “There’s a lot of giggling, there’s a lot of shooting the sh*t,” Briney says about his dynamic with the rest of the cast and crew. A year after wrapping, he still talks to Sean Kaufman (who plays Steven Conklin) every day.

Briney is used to being surrounded by actors. He was raised in Connecticut, and his parents met in New York while auditioning. His sister was also interested in acting. Briney was “not really a rebel,” but still tried to resist following in their footsteps. A high school class changed his mind. (“I was like, ‘Sh*t, this is really fun.”) From there, he attended theater camp and later, Pace University, where he earned his BFA in acting in 2020. As a student, he picked up gigs at Staples and Trader Joe’s. (To this day, Briney thinks that a person’s go-to Trader Joe’s snack says a lot about their personality.)

I assume that I’m always on the brink of being fired.

The auditions slowly ramped up after graduation. He booked The Summer I Turned Pretty while he was on location in Liverpool for his first film, the indie drama Dalíland, in which Briney played Salvador Dalí’s assistant. But when the director’s daughter told him that she’d read the series, the magnitude of his new job didn’t click. “I thought, ‘Oh, small world.’ I was totally not aware how many people read and loved these books.”

Even after wrapping Season 1, Briney was still not sure exactly what he had signed up for. “In a way, I’m nostalgic for our first season before anybody saw it — just the anonymity,” he says. “When it came out the next year, that was the weirdest moment, realizing ‘Oh, right, we’re sharing this. This isn’t just for us.’"

Briney says he won’t be tuning into the finale — he’s seen Season 1 and the first couple episodes of Season 2, and he wants to leave it at that. “I don’t like watching myself. It’s that spiral of ‘What am I doing? Was I ever good? Will I ever be good?’” he says. “I assume that I’m always on the brink of being fired.”

He may doubt himself, but he seems to be alone in that. Han — who wrote the books and serves as the series’ creator, co-showrunner, and executive producer — is confident that Briney is the right person to play Conrad. “There’s a depth and a sensitivity to his performance that the character required,” she says. “Chris is able to say a lot with just his eyes, and you just know the character feels so much more than they are able to express.”

Even now, the show’s (and his own) success takes Briney by surprise. “I still expect no one to watch it. I expect to wake up to someone telling me, ‘No, we were all kidding.’” But Briney is unlikely to get his Truman Show moment.

It’s been more than 14 years since Han’s final book, We’ll Always Have Summer, came out. And yet, the audience is anxiously awaiting the series’ conclusion, especially how the love triangle will unfold. The cast and creators have been teasing that the show may make some changes to the ending. (Spoiler alert: In the book series, Belly and Conrad end up together.) It’s a topic that Briney won’t touch. “I think Jenny’s done a great job of updating these stories. From talking to her, I know that one of her goals is updating the story for how she would write it now,” he says. “Stay tuned. Have fun watching it. It’s hard for me to say much.”

Despite the cast’s silence, fan theories abound. “We were doing a junket the other week and someone said something about colors and albums and Taylor Swift, I think. I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” he says. “To be fair, Jenny could totally have planned that and I wouldn’t know, but I hear that and I’m like, ‘There’s no way.’"

The level of investment from fans is evident — and sometimes, intense. “Some people take what characters do a little too personally, and they tend to assume that I have control over what my character does and says, which can be a little funny,” Briney says. “But the fact that people care and want to take the time to theorize… At the end of the day, it’s just cool to have people caring about the work.”

People have definitely crossed lines and stepped on personal boundaries.

Sometimes these theories extend beyond the story itself — for every viral video theorizing about the plot, there’s one about the actors’ real-life interactions. Briney’s quick to name the biggest misconception about the cast dynamic: “People read into stuff a lot, and it always blows me away how quickly they believe things. There’s some sleuthing where I’m like, ‘Maybe it’s not that deep,’” he says. “Sometimes people conflate an actor with character. It can just be taken a little too far.”

Fans — especially those harboring crushes on Briney or Conrad or both — also pay a lot of attention to the actor’s off-screen relationship. Briney’s been dating his girlfriend, Isabel Machado, since 2021, and he happily brings her up throughout the shoot day, dishing on their favorite date-night plans and New York Times recipes. (They’re both fans of the hot honey chicken thighs.) “It's been a learning experience. People have definitely crossed lines and stepped on personal boundaries. That’s just a fact, but I learned in college to separate myself from a character, so I’ve never had any personal issues,” he says. “I’ve learned to separate myself from social media and understand that I have my own life. If people have opinions about it, all right, that’s fine.”

Still, he’s “super duper grateful” for the work and the fan devotion. “In college, I said that I will consider myself lucky if I can just support myself through acting, even if nobody watches. This has surpassed that by a lot.”

Briney credits his family, especially his dad, who watches every episode, and his friends, with keeping him level-headed. “I don’t think they’d ever let me get out of hand or be the kind of person that I don’t want to be.”

The person sitting across from me on the couch — who admits to playing Pokémon instead of checking social media — doesn’t seem to have an ego problem. Despite montages of Conrad racking up more than 3 million views on TikTok, Briney rejected the “heartthrob” label and has called himself a “stupid f*cking idiot” instead — and it’s not false modesty. “I stand by that,” he tells me when I ask about his quote to InStyle last year. “I’m a stupid f*cking idiot. I remind myself of that every day.”

I thought God would strike me down if I was that honest in an interview. But God’s afraid of her.

When I ask him if in 10 years he’ll be like “I f*cking hate Twilight’,” he assures me, “I won’t pull a Rob Pattinson.” But he’s quick to share the ways he looks up to the actor, which includes his entrance into the indie scene. “I would probably kill someone to have his career. I’m jealous of the directors he’s gotten to work with. The way he’s handled himself. He’s just a baddie, and he’s had the coolest career of all time.”

Another actor he appreciates is Reneé Rapp, his co-star in the 2024 Mean Girls remake, where he played Aaron Samuels. I point out her approach to press is more blunt than his. “She’s hilarious. I admire her honesty. I was like, ‘Damn, you can just say this?’ I thought God would strike me down if I was that honest in an interview. But God’s afraid of her.”

Now, Briney is playing the role of a harmless f*ckboi in Dilaria, an off-Broadway play that runs until Aug. 8. “It's been really fun and fulfilling and challenging,” the NYC-based actor says. “I can find a groove where I'm like, 'All right, let's go out there and kill it.’ But then the audience won't laugh at one line, and I get caught in: ‘F*ck I'm just not funny. They hate me.’ It’s almost refreshing.”

“It’s like what Bill Hader said about his anxiety doing SNL. He would purposely f*ck up a line sometimes, and that would make him feel so much better. Because he was like, ‘Well, I already messed up. F*ck it.’” For Briney, that strategy remains a work in progress. “I’m trying to be perfect still, so I’ve got to work on that.”

Briney has at least one more summer left that’s sure to be dominated by The Summer I Turned Pretty. As he awaits the fervor of this last season, he isn’t looking too far into the future. “Sometimes, I manifest things. I’ll say it a little facetiously, but there’ll be a part of me that’s like, ‘Well, if this works, it works.’ A part of me that wants to believe in it,” he says.

His current goals are well within reach: more time to write, a vacation, and one more thing: “I would love to not go back to Staples, to be honest.”