Sabrina Brier Conquered TikTok. Now She’s Looking to Hollywood

When I talk to TikTok star Sabrina Brier in person, I quickly learn there are two people to meet.

The first is the character Sabrina. This Sabrina is silly and effusive and a tad bit privileged. She can put her foot in her mouth, but she’s well-intentioned. She’s that friend who hates her friend’s boyfriend and makes it obvious, that friend who is always social climbing but has her BFF’s back. She’s a transplant to New York City who claims to know every hot restaurant and bar but can’t correctly pronounce Houston Street. Sabrina, the character, is also popular. Her videos, many of which start with the prompt “that friend who,” are ever-present fixtures on TikTok’s For You page. Brier now has more than 800,000 followers on the platform and another 300,000 on Instagram, gets consistent brand partnerships, and even has a few iconic memes to her name.

Then there’s the real Sabrina, the one who meets me on a frigid afternoon at a café in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood dressed casually in a Yankees hat. Most of her followers online know very little about this version of her—and that, she tells me, is by design.

“I knew immediately I would never step outside of the character [on TikTok] because that’s just not what I do,” she tells me. “I’ve never been the kind of person who was tweeting a lot of my real thoughts. I have too many thoughts and too many feelings. What I like to do with it, and what I find most cathartic and expressive, is to channel them into characters, into fictional spaces, into stage work. That’s just where I’ve always existed.”

The real Sabrina Brier, I come to learn, is thinking 10 steps ahead. While she is, of course, endlessly thankful for her incredible success on TikTok, it isn’t the end goal. And though she respects the career, she would never call herself an influencer. When she saw a notification on her phone that TikTok was officially banned in the US (and then, of course, was immediately reinstated), she was remarkably sanguine for someone who had built an entire career on the app.

“I look at TikTok as something I’m so grateful for,” she says. “I can’t believe how much it’s brought me. And the people who have followed me from the beginning, they’re always going to have a special place in my heart. But I also know that what I make and the things I want to make are not just dependent on one platform or one form.”

Over the years Brier has batted down invites for press trips to the Hamptons and said no to opportunities like hosting her own podcast, all because they don’t serve the ultimate plan: to create a character and a world on TikTok that is so compelling that it serves as a virtual résumé. She wants to take Sabrina—the character, but also herself—to Hollywood.

“For a long time as I developed this character online, the goal has been to eventually get her on a screen and have my own show,” she says. “Being a showrunner and a star of a show has been such a North Star for me since college.”

On Tuesday, Brier is stepping into what she considers the next big step by releasing an audiobook, That Friend. The book is serving as her first opportunity to truly expand the character of Sabrina beyond the confines of TikTok, to give her a background, friends and family, and a storyline. The book runs about four hours, contains different “episodic” sections (which was important to Brier), and is performed by a full cast—including names as big and varied as Nicola Coughlan, Rachel Zegler, and Lukas Gage. She got many of them on board, she says, by getting to know them through social media.

“Being on the internet really teaches you how much more accessible people are than you think,” she says.

When Simon and Schuster editors first approached Brier about doing an exclusively audio project, the initial pitch was to write more of a memoir. But she went back to them, pitching instead a completely fictionalized project with which she could bring Sabrina the character to life. She wrote the script in the first half of 2024, giving her character a gaggle of close friends, a bankrolling yet exasperated father, and a central conflict: Sabrina’s journey trying to start an “advice” podcast—even though she may be the last person who should do so.

“It was just an amazing practice at expanding the universe of the character, bringing her down to earth a bit, making her a bit more fleshed out and grounded,” Brier says of writing the audiobook. “And starting to explore what it means to have the characters around her be much more dynamic and have journeys of their own.”

Many of the friends in the series are based on Brier’s real life-crew (her roommate both in real life and in the audiobook is a nurse named Alice). Her friends have been invaluable in creating Sabrina’s world, often filming videos for her or serving as bit players. She describes her days as constantly mining for content, observing the hilarious things her friends say and the universal truths they discuss about dating, womanhood, and making your way as a 20-something in New York.

“I always say the most fun videos to watch have often come out of an organic conversation at drinks,” she says. Sometimes, she will even stop her friends in the moment and ask them to repeat what they just said for TikTok.

“I’m like, ‘Hey guys, so actually I’m going to pay for this dinner. Can we just step outside?’ I’m just so guilty, so frantic. I’m constantly asking, ‘Can you film me really quick?’ And they’re like, ‘Okay.’ I think that’s really created the realism in the whole process.”

Brier isn’t capturing these moments purely to go viral or reach her goals. She’s effusive about the richness of normal or even mundane experiences among a group of women, about how every woman is a tapestry of humor and passion. Her idea to create a television show centered around a group of young, female, 20-something friends in the city gives obvious Girls or Sex in the City vibes, so I ask her: What would her version look like?

“I would want to stay true to the Holy Quad of women,” she says, referring to Girls and Sex in the City. “But I love the idea of having something episodic that focuses on really small aspects of living in New York and being young, where we’re following one really particular problem…like trying to work our way up in the corporate fields, which are not always built for us. I would want things to feel a little bit more grounded. I want to have a character who is paying off student loans. There are so many interesting aspects of trying to survive in New York and to build your career that is so different today.”

And as she prepares to step into this next stage of her career, she counts as idols women who made the jump from character to actor to writer to mogul—like Reese Witherspoon, Issa Rae, and Quinta Brunson.

“What I want is to have an office I can go to with incredible people I’m already collaborating with and be able to hire them and work with them every single day and have a landing spot for all of my ideas and to lead and be a boss,” she says. “That’s what the vision is for me.”

Photographer: Lara Callahan
Styling: Morgan Bienvenu
Makeup: Amanda Thesen
Hair: Corey Tuttle