Jordan Chiles + Noah Beck Reveal the New Playbook for Sports, Stardom & Social
I talked onstage with the TikTok and Tubi star, and the ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Olympian (who slips she has a big Nike announcement coming)
I cover the creator economy at Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter that’s being sampled today for all subscribers to The Ankler. I wrote about Patreon’s strategy to poach Substack creators and Netflix’s missteps as it moves to recruit top podcasters, and I interviewed two Gen Z media founders about how to win young audiences. I’m natalie@theankler.com
It’s not every day that an Olympic gold medalist asks you to record a video for her. But that’s exactly what happened Saturday afternoon when creator and actor Noah Beck met gymnast Jordan Chiles. It turns out that just a few hours after the duo were scheduled to join me for a conversation about the growing intersection of sports, stardom and social media, Chiles would be hosting her UCLA Gymnastics teammates for a girls’ night — and they were all planning to watch Beck’s new film, Sidelined 2: Intercepted. Could he film a video saying hi to everyone? Beck happily complied, then turned the camera on Chiles, asking if she’d make a video for his older sister.
There’s clearly a lot of mutual respect between Beck and Chiles, both 24, two serious athletes whose careers have taken very different paths. Beck was a D1 soccer player at the University of Portland when the pandemic derailed his plans and he discovered TikTok. Soon he was racking up millions of followers and brands were calling, but in the pre-NIL days, he couldn’t accept any deals without risking his collegiate eligibility. Forced to make a decision, he chose TikTok, where he now has 33 million followers and counting. But he’s still putting his experience on the soccer field to use in his career. Last year, he starred in his first film, Sidelined: The QB and Me, as a lovesick football player with collegiate ambitions, which spawned a TikTok meme and became the most-watched title on streamer Tubi in its first week. The sequel, Sidelined 2: Intercepted, debuted last month.
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“You don’t realize how much acting is like a team sport until you get on a set and you realize how many working pieces there are,” Beck told a standing room-only crowd at the new Meta Lab store in West Hollywood. “It’s a miracle that a movie gets made.”
Chiles, meanwhile, largely left social media management to her mom as she reached the highest level of her sport, competing for Team USA at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 2024 Paris Olympics. She’s leaned into TikTok a lot more in recent months as part of her commanding performance on season 34 of Dancing With the Stars, where she and her pro partner Ezra Sosa placed third. (DWTS found major new traction with Gen Z audiences this season thanks to social media — I wrote all about the strategy that powered the show’s most-watched finale in nearly a decade.)
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Now with more than 1 million followers on TikTok (1.6 million on Instagram) and plans to compete in her final season of eligibility at UCLA, Chiles is leveraging her place on the world stage to make inroads in the fashion industry — she alluded to a new chapter in her partnership with Nike — and to mentor other collegiate athletes about how to embrace NIL opportunities. “My motto for 2025 was this year I did my big one. Next year, I’m going bigger,” she said on stage (IYKYK, but if you don’t, it’s a reference to Megan Thee Stallion’s hit “Right Now”).
You can watch the full YouTube video above of our conversation — “Scoring Big: Building Fandom (and Careers) Off the Field” — or read on for an edited version. Chiles and Beck offered a look behind-the-scenes of life in the public eye and key takeaways for other creators, from how they’ve turned millions of followers into new creative opportunities to how they navigate the pressure to post and respond (or not) to the haters.
“The biggest thing that I learned is I don’t have to really allow those people to dictate what’s next, and that it’s okay to step away,” Chiles said of her evolving relationship with social media. “I can’t change who I am, but I can change what the audience is seeing.”
‘Being Seen’ on Social Media
Jordan, you recently hit 1 million followers on TikTok — up there with the gold medal right? How has your relationship with social media changed coming off your big moment on Dancing With the Stars?
Jordan Chiles: First off, thank you guys for allowing me to be here and to have this opportunity to also sit next to Noah Beck! This is crazy. Being a gymnast and being part of Team USA, social media only really ramped up every four years after the Olympics. Being part of Dancing With the Stars definitely changed the game. It’s a really cool opportunity to showcase a different side of you. I can say my relationship with social media is definitely better than it was before in that I really get to engage into a different side. Now it’s not just gymnastics.
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Noah, you’ve had a lot of viral TikToks over the years but one of the recent ones is a clip from Sidelined that doesn’t live on your page. As you’ve focused more on acting, how has your relationship with social media changed?
Noah Beck: Social media is very different from when I first started. It’s evolved into this thing that is much bigger than just trending dancing and fun videos with your friends. But my relationship with it still feels like it’s in that same place as when I started in 2020. It was something to pass the time, and honestly I try to still think of it in that way, because there’s that pure innocence of just posting when you want and not trying to be too meticulous about it.
Now with pivoting into acting, I’m still trying to find the balance of how much do I post, how much do I not. You don’t want to oversaturate yourself. Taking inspiration from my favorite actors, you didn’t know much about them before social media. You kind of want that mystique around you as an actor. But it also feels like I’m pioneering this new way of going from social media to acting. It’s not traditional in any sense because it’s so new, but there’s some leverage to that because I bring an audience, my followers.
Let’s go back to the moment you both started to think of social media as part of your career. Jordan, was it ahead of your first Olympics that you began to consider how you were presenting yourself on social media?
Chiles: I’m gonna be completely honest, it didn’t come until probably now. I actually have an amazing social media manager, and she’s my own mother. I didn’t like social media. I felt like social media is just a facade, and it didn’t make sense because no matter what people were always going to negatively talk about you. I didn’t think it was necessary for me to put what you already see on TV onto another platform. But I had to recognize that my sport is what’s going to make me go quote-unquote viral. My sport is something I get to do every single day and people are enjoying it.
The biggest moment that caught my eye was back in 2014, the first time Biles and Chiles ever went viral. I was like, what is happening? All I did was win my junior division and she won her senior division. That’s when people started to really realize how much talent I had, which then helped me be like, Okay, if people are seeing the talent, I’m being seen. I never thought I was seen in my sport, not one bit. I was about 13 years old, and from then on social media kind of tagged along with me every day.
Now it’s just something that you live with. I mean, hitting 1.6 million followers on Instagram is like, wow. All those people are seeing me, and it’s not just my sport that they’re looking at but also the fashion that I love, the way that I was on Dancing With the Stars, the way that I love animals, the way that I wake up and eat cereal. It can touch them in ways that you didn’t think.
Noah, you’ve got something like 33 million TikTok followers. Do you think about that very often and does that affect how you post?
Beck: When you put it like that, it’s a little daunting.
Chiles: I’m one of those followers.
Beck: Full transparency, I try not to think about it. I’m not any different than who I was when I had 500 followers. I’m really grateful for what my parents taught me at a young age about social media, about not posting anything your future boss or coach wouldn’t want to see.
‘Don’t Let Other People Dictate What’s Next’
What was the moment when you realized TikTok was more than just something fun to do with your friends but could be an actual career?
Beck: I started posting on social media due to the boredom of Covid. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to these posts. One of them would be a trending dance that I would learn with my sister, and then the other one would be a thirst trap, and then the other one would be baking with my mom or soccer in the backyard.
The first video I posted was because of a stupid little bet with my sister. She had TikTok. I didn’t know what it was at first. I’d see her making these videos and I was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I bet I can get more followers than you in two weeks. I think I just needed something competitive. I looked up what people my age were doing. And I just posted. I went to bed. I woke up and I had 20,000 followers. I had to set another goal to keep me motivated during this really unmotivating time.
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The moment it became not a hobby was when I started to get emails from these brands basically saying, we see you have X amount of followers, we’d like to pay you X amount to promote this product or to use this sound in a video. Being an NCAA Division 1 athlete at the time I wasn’t able to make any money based on my name — this was the year before the NIL deal was passed. Who’s to say what would’ve happened a year earlier? But in hindsight I like to think that it did me a favor because I was able to choose one and commit fully to that.
Jordan, you’re really passionate about helping other young female athletes navigate the NIL space. What have you learned from your own experience with NIL that you’re passing on to the next generation?
Chiles: I have an athlete initiative that I created called SHERO. I’m mentoring two gymnasts right now, and basically they get insight from me on what to know before you go into college. I wanted to make sure the other athletes that are coming in, that they have the right resources and that they also understand that you’re more than just your sport. As gymnasts, we don’t get a lot of deals. I mean, yes, I am a part of Nike, yes I’ve been on a Lucky Charms box. But how long does that last?
Social media gives you a different level of control over how you position yourself with the world. Do you think about that differently in big moments like the Olympics?
Chiles: No, not at all. The biggest thing that I taught myself throughout social media is especially in our sport, they expect us to be perfect all the time. And not having a perfect social media is the best thing I could ever do. Because it’s like, you think I’m perfect, but no, I have bad days. Do you think I wake up with my hair like this? No. And I started to realize there were things that I couldn’t control — the person that’s coming to my page, they don’t like something within themselves so they’re gonna critique whatever they see on the screen. So how I started to play the game — because I just like playing the game all the time — is I started to realize and spot what people don’t like about me and emphasize it even more. So you are still gonna see it, and I’m gonna make it even bigger because at the end of the day it’s my page. You don’t like my hair? Okay, I’m gonna make it even better. You don’t like my skin tone? Well girl, I’m about to post a bikini pic, you’re gonna see all the skin. So it’s about, how can I emphasize things that are so imperfect but make it perfect?
How do you both navigate social media in moments of challenge? Do you feel like you can take a break and take a step back, or do you lean in to social media in those moments?
Chiles: It’s different between men [and women], and I’m only saying that because I’ve dealt with it. I’ve gone off of social media and I come back and people are like, “Oh my gosh, were you pregnant?” What? That made no sense. I didn’t even post a man, I’m very confused. So how do you take your time away from a challenge that has happened? Being a woman of color, or just being a woman, there is always something that’s gonna be criticized. And so I think the biggest thing that I learned is I don’t have to really allow those people to dictate what’s next, and that it’s okay to step away. I can’t change who I am, but I can change what the audience is seeing.
Beck: I didn’t go into this thinking that I was gonna be followed by anyone, let alone 33 million or whatever it’s at. But now that I have that and now that I have these eyes on me, I don’t want that to change how I post. I think it comes with a level of security in yourself and knowing what it is you’re putting out. These are my pillars that make me who I am, and how do I stay true to those? And as long as I’m doing that, comments that come in, whether they be negative or not, you have to take all of them with a grain of salt. You have to take the positive ones the same way you take the negative ones. For me, not letting the highs get too high and not letting the lows get too low when it comes to the comments in particular has helped me.
‘All Good Things Stem From Delusion’
Noah, when did you start to pursue acting?
Beck: Due to the people that followed me because they resonate with my stuff — I don’t know why they follow me but —
It’s the thirst traps.
Beck: Potentially, but for whatever reason, people follow me. It’s opened a lot of doors and created opportunities that I didn’t even know were in my playing cards for life. And for 10-year-old Noah that wanted to become a professional soccer player, how do you pivot? Acting for me came about, I would say, in like 2022. I started to just dive into it, and I love it. It’s not that I wanted to get away from social media, but I felt like I had this void creatively.
The first two years of social media from 2020 to when I came out to L.A,. it was a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. And full transparency, a lot of it stuck. I ended up really enjoying these opportunities that were coming to me, and I just was committing to all of them. Then you start to get a little spread thin, so I started really focusing. Acting became this thing, and it was a little delusional, but I think all good things stem from delusion. At first I was like, people seem to enjoy me on this little screen, right? Surely that can translate onto a big screen. And you know, it seems to have worked.
I went into acting with the only approach that I know, and that’s the athletic approach of showing up, being persistent and having a routine, being disciplined and going to classes and just putting in the hours. The hardest thing that I had to realize with acting was oh, it’s not win or lose. Movies and acting are so subjective. A lot of it comes down to just trust in yourself.
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As you were coming out of the most recent Olympics, Jordan, you had a really huge platform and a lot of eyes on you. How did you think about where to take your career next?
Chiles: The biggest thing that I wanted to dive deeper into was the fashion world. So doing New York Fashion Week was big. My goal is to get to the Met Gala. If I could just get to the Met Gala once, I’m good, I could just live my life. Fashion is something that I’ve always wanted to do ever since I was little. You know, I never had imaginary friends. I had imaginary dreams, and finally being able to grasp onto those dreams and make them my reality, I was like, okay, now what’s next? How can I keep going? How can I keep pushing?
Being athletes, that competitiveness in us just automatically comes out. So that’s how I put myself into that next era: Okay, what’s gonna be competitive to me? And that’s fashion. That’s hard. I did 10 shows in three days. How did I do that? Couldn’t tell you. But I challenged myself, I said yes and I kept saying yes. If this is gonna put me in a different era outside of being Jordan the gymnast, then great, let’s do it.
Was Dancing With the Stars on the vision board or did they call you?
Chiles: It was on the vision board. I started watching Dancing With the Stars 20 years ago. It was one of those imaginary dreams, and I was like there’s no way. I’m not gonna get called. Deena [Katz, the casting director] actually called me three times, and I said no three times. But saying yes was the best thing, because I could go on the show to tell my story in a broader way.
Did you approach the competition differently than you would for a gymnastic competition?
Chiles: The hardest part was having to dance in heels, because I am on bare feet all the time. The biggest thing that scared Ezra, my partner, at first was that I was treating our dress rehearsals like they were practices before a competition. I wouldn’t care if I messed up. He would get freaked out and I would have to tell him, “This is my process, this is what I do.” Because every time I would step out onto a competition floor, I knew I would dominate.
What’s next for you both? Noah, will there be a Sidelined 3? The ending of the second movie left an opening for another film.
Beck: I’m hoping there is, I would love to return to this character. It’s pretty surreal to think that my first acting gig has the potential to have a third film, so that’s gotta be a good sign. If this industry will continue to have me, I will continue to be there. It’s been the first thing since having soccer stripped away that’s filled this creative thing in me. And honestly, you don’t realize how much acting is a team sport until you get on a set and you realize how many working pieces there are. It is a miracle that a movie gets made. I fell in love with it, the collaboration of making a movie — and with Sidelined I was with it pretty early on, from when we were first adapting the book, and I got an executive producer credit. So it was amazing sculpting this thing from ground up to now, fast forward, the success that it’s had. And I will continue to do more — there are a few things lined up for me next year that I’m very excited about.
Chiles: My motto for 2025 was, this year I did my big one. Next year I’m going bigger. If you know the quote, you know the quote.
I would love to step into another world. I feel like I’ve done an amazing job with fashion, and that’s obviously going to elevate into a whole new thing. I want to start a clothing line. I want to do all these things. I do have something coming out with Nike that I can’t really talk about. Hopefully you might see me on a TV screen. But the biggest thing right now is just enjoying the moments that 2025 gave me.
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