Teen Heartthrob to ‘Hacks’: How Christopher Briney Won Jean Smart’s Heart
The ‘Summer I Turned Pretty’ star on playing an unlikely romantic match
This story contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Hacks. Read at your own risk!
Christopher Briney is technically not quite done with the role that made him famous. In just a few days, he’ll report back to work in North Carolina for the movie follow-up to The Summer I Turned Pretty, giving him one last chance to play the moody, irresistible Conrad Fisher. But he’s also learned what happens after starring in a giant TV hit. First things first: Guest star on another one!
The 28-year-old made his debut on the final season of Hacks last night, playing an earnest and distinctly Harry Styles-coded musician named Nico Hayes, who embarks on an unlikely romance with Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance. During his guest stint, Briney deploys all the soft gazes and brooding line delivery that had millions of people signing up for Team Conrad. But when he’s aiming all that charisma at Smart, and creating a genuine romantic spark with an actress who had won three Emmys before he graduated elementary school — now that’s the kind of swerve we love to see from a young actor on the rise.
As Briney told me in a call from his home in New York a few weeks ago, the Hacks audition came about in the usual way, albeit during the intense, globe-trotting rollout of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s final season last fall.
“I was in a car on my way home in traffic, and I knew I had this Zoom and I had had no time to really sink my teeth into and prepare for this,” he says. “I got home with 30 seconds to spare.”
Nailing that audition means that Briney joins the ranks of Hacks guest stars that include Jane Adams, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher McDonald, Kaitlin Olson, Ann Dowd, Cherry Jones, Leslie Bibb and Alanna Ubach — and that’s just this season. It’s hard to imagine many people say no when Hacks comes calling (the HBO Max show has earned 10 guest acting nominations in its four prior seasons, including wins for Metcalf and Julianne Nicholson). However, after making his name as an often dead-serious romantic leading man, Briney knew that he wanted to jump into Hacks’ rarefied comedic air — even if he had to tell a white lie to get there.
In that Zoom audition, Briney tells me, “They asked me if I could sing and I lied and said, ‘Yeah.’” Even though he’s done an off-Broadway show, was in the Mean Girls movie musical and is now playing a rock star on Hacks — complete with songs that he recorded for the episode — Briney swears that vocal skills still elude him.
“Both my parents have beautiful voices, so it should be in the genes somewhere,” he says. “I just never really worked at it, and I’ve never claimed that. But when it’s Hacks, you don’t say no. I wasn’t going to be like, ‘I’d love to do it, but I can’t sing.’ It’s Hacks!”
In classic Hacks fashion, Nico’s swoony romance with Deborah has a twist in store. She’s convinced he’s into her for the publicity and leans into that narrative, calling the paparazzi about their secretive date; he, meanwhile, is genuinely into her and heartbroken to realize she broke his trust and doesn’t hate the intrusion of the press as much as he does. Before their split, though, Nico throws Deborah off her game in a glorious way — a tonal shift that Hacks is well equipped to pull off in its fifth season. It was a fun challenge for Briney, who was a fan of the show long before stepping onto the set for the first time.
“Reading the scripts, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is such a different side of Deborah,’” he says. “In the last season, there were so many moments of her and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) butting heads and trying to get the upper hand, and then to see her settle down into something, it was really cool.”
Nico’s time with Deborah is pretty much contained to this week’s episode (he makes a brief appearance later this season). But Briney is hopeful that the role is the start of a new chapter for him that may last much longer.
“To be able to do comedy and hop into a different world from what people have seen me do was a blessing,” he tells me. “It’s hard to sit with certainty how anything will be received, but I hope that it’ll open the doors for maybe some more comedy and some more stuff on HBO, because they do some of the best stuff.”
I joke that he could pitch himself for a role on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and he runs with it: “Yeah, put me on The Last of Us!”
Amazon MGM is, wisely, keeping the Oscar buzz for Project Hail Mary at a low boil for the moment. Just as the Sinners team did last year, I expect the cast and directors to go mostly silent through the summer and early fall before roaring back for an Oscar push later in the year — Phil Lord and Chris Miller, I will hold a spot for you on the Prestige Junkie podcast in the meantime. Still, I was heartened to see Clayton Davis reporting that James Ortiz — the puppeteer who helped operate and also voiced the alien creature Rocky — is eligible for best supporting actor and will be campaigned by the studio, despite the fact that Ortiz never appears onscreen. It reminds me a lot of the push to consider Andy Serkis in the best supporting actor category for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, for a turn that’s still a high-water mark for what performance-capture acting can be. It didn’t work out for Serkis, and Return of the King still holds the record for the most Oscar wins (11) without a single acting nomination. We’ve come a long way in performance-capture and other technology-assisted performances since then, but the Oscars have remained stubbornly resistant. But as I always say, something has never happened at the Oscars until it happens, and if Sinners and Everything Everywhere All at Once have cracked the door open for genre movies at the Oscars, Ortiz may now be positioned to run through it.
I’m still busy pumping my fist in victory that Paper Tiger, the new film from James Gray, has not only been added to the Cannes competition lineup after all, but has been picked up for distribution by Neon, which is already representing a strong handful of contenders at this year’s festival. I still don’t exactly understand why it wasn’t part of the lineup when it was originally announced, or why festival chair Thierry Frémaux was out there giving interviews about how much he wanted the film to be there. I’m guessing there was some kind of behind-the-scenes negotiation or money involved that no one will ever explain to me, though if you’ve got the gossip, please share! I’m just thrilled that Gray will now join Ira Sachs — another perpetually underrated New York filmmaker — as the only two Americans with competition films at Cannes, thus getting a whole lot of the spotlight to themselves. Je suis vraiment enthousiaste!