Major spoilers ahead for the season 2 finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Christopher Briney knows that staunch supporters of team Conrad, the brooding Fisher brother he plays on The Summer I Turned Pretty, have been put through the wringer. In the sophomore season of the hit Prime Video romantic drama series, Conrad returns to the dreamy fictional Massachusetts town of Cousins Beach under a very different set of circumstances: his mother, Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), has just died of cancer; he and protagonist Belly (Lola Tung) are not on speaking terms after breaking up on the stormy night of her prom; and Susannah’s half-sister, Julia (Kyra Sedgwick), is adamant about selling their family’s beloved summer house.
Across eight episodes, which mostly take place over the course of a week at the start of summer, the teens, with the help of Steven (Sean Kaufman) and Belly’s mother, Laurel (Jackie Chung), are able to convince Julia to back out of an existing deal and sell the property instead to Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and Conrad’s father, Adam (Tom Everett Scott). Having saved the house and passed his biology final to transfer from Brown University to Princeton, an upbeat Conrad is ready to ask Belly for another chance — only to find her making out with Jeremiah on the hood of Conrad's car.
“Conrad has taken a lot of things for granted, and he has made a lot of assumptions based on his own feelings without taking into consideration the fact that other people’s lives move on,” Briney tells Teen Vogue in a video interview from New York City that was conducted in late June. “He’s been obsessing over the details [of his break-up] and his understanding of the situation that he forgot that there’s a whole other person involved there. Time has passed, things have changed, he f*cked up, and he never owned up to it.”
The realization that his ex-girlfriend has rekindled a romance with his younger brother knocks the wind out of Conrad, who lashes out during a painfully awkward car ride with Belly and Jeremiah before a rainstorm forces them to share a motel room overnight.
“I saw [the finale] as an opportunity for an 18-year-old to have a little bit of a tantrum,” Briney says with a half-mischievous smile. “He’s so beyond upset and beyond anger. It surpasses all of that, and all he knows how to do is attack people and pout and just try to be a physical obstacle in the way of other people. It was really fun to be a dickhead and try to stir the pot and make digs at these people. I think I took it a little too far sometimes and made Gavin mad a few times, and I definitely said some things that were probably cut out.”
The next morning, before Belly can clear the air between them, Conrad announces that he will take a bus back to Cousins, essentially removing himself from the thorny love triangle — for the time being! — and allowing Belly and Jeremiah to drive to the former’s volleyball camp in peace. “I think he’s just made the decision that he needs to not be a part of this because he knows he’s just gonna want to lash out and do something,” Briney explains. “I think he decides their feelings and what they want; it’s the beginning of him attempting to let go and be like, ‘I’m okay not being in the middle of this anymore.’ And he’s not, clearly. I think it’s really hard for him.”
Though he can sometimes fall victim to his own ignorance, Conrad “always does care about the other people in his world,” adds Briney, who thinks his character is “too caught up in what just happened and the future situations and potential outcomes in his mind” to feel the deep-seated love that Belly and Jeremiah still have for him in that final motel room scene. “I think what’s exciting for Conrad going forward is part of the way you know he cares is how nervous he is and how precious he is about it because he understands that he doesn’t want to hurt [Belly], and he doesn’t want to offend her. Above all, he wants her to be happy. … And at the end of the day, that’s being happy with or without him. I think that’s sort of his North Star, if you will: ‘As long as she’s happy, then I guess I’ll have to be happy.’”
One could argue that the finale is a rare moment of emotional maturity for Conrad, who Briney admits he “kind of hated” for his dismissive and closed-off nature when he first read Jenny Han’s Summer novels. Whereas the freshman season required him to recall moments in his life when he “didn’t know how to handle myself or my emotions,” the sophomore season feels more accurate to how he sees himself, growth and feelings and all.
But that isn’t to say that Briney and Conrad are so alike that the actor doesn’t find himself second-guessing the decision-making of his much younger onscreen counterpart. “I think Conrad as a character does a lot of things that maybe require some justification, period,” Briney laughs.
For instance, the third episode flashes back to the ill-fated prom night, when a helpless Belly decided to dump an emotionally distant Conrad, who had been struggling with Susannah’s declining health. “Looking at that as Chris, I’m like, ‘You’re at prom with your date. You gotta pretend. Even if you’re not there [emotionally], you can’t ruin someone else’s night because you’re going through something,’” he says. “You’re allowed to go through something, you’re allowed to have your journey, but [not] when it falls on other people’s shoulders. I think one of his problems as a person that is growing in the world is that he sometimes doesn’t realize the effect that he has on people and on other people’s lives.”
Briney, by his own admission, tries to be more aware of how his actions affect the people around him. Born and raised in Connecticut to parents who had dabbled in acting and met in New York City in the 1980s, Briney, who had dreams of becoming a professional baseball player and briefly considered going into computer science, discovered his love for acting while participating in a summer theater program in high school.
“I didn’t really, at the time, know what I had discovered because I didn’t really feel like I was at a point in my life where I necessarily had to know for certain what I was gonna do with my life,” says Briney, who went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pace University in 2020. “What I always said well before I booked anything was if I can just make a living doing this in one way or another, I’ll be happy.”
After having his first big break in director Mary Harron’s indie film Dalíland, which starred Ben Kingsley as the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí in the ’70s, Briney landed the role that would shoot him to Gen Z stardom in early 2022. Although he reiterates he is “extremely grateful” that audiences have such strong opinions about the story and the characters, Briney admits that “it’s just weird to have people have opinions of your life” and for them to share those thoughts so openly. “I think I’ve learned that I am the only one who knows me — and that’s okay, and I can be content in that,” he says of the biggest learning curve he has faced in the year since the show’s debut.
How has he navigated the dizzying amount of attention that comes with rising to international fame? “I think it really just comes down to feeling the community that I’ve built,” Briney responds matter-of-factly. “I have a lot of friends that I went to college with, that I’ve been acting with and growing with for seven years now. I have a girlfriend who I love a lot and who loves me a lot. These people will always be honest with me, and if I was ever getting in my own head or letting my ego explode, they’d call me out for it, and I appreciate them for that and I trust them.”
The cast and crew of Summer will have to wait until the end of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes to return to Wilmington, North Carolina, to shoot the third (and possibly final?) season, which will consist of 10 episodes. Fans of Han’s novels are well-aware of who Belly chooses by the end of the trilogy, but there is still no guarantee that the author-turned-showrunner will adhere to her original ending.
So, what is the best argument he can make for Belly and Conrad? “They are just destined for each other, in my mind, and they’re just very compatible people,” says Briney, who wanted the prom and Susannah’s funeral scenes this season to “be as brutal as they could without ruining anybody’s feelings” about the two characters. “They’re childhood friends, and I think in this [fictional] world, fate, destiny and childhood dreams come true, and I think that magic is why they have to be together. It just is the way it’s supposed to be.”
For his part, Christopher Briney will next be seen in Paramount Pictures’ Mean Girls musical movie, in which he stars as high-school heartthrob Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of Plastics leader Regina George (Renée Rapp) and love interest of Cady Heron (Angourie Rice). Although his close friends may argue that he has a good sense of humor, Briney concedes that the comedic timing required to land jokes is a lot harder than it looks, even if he relished the opportunity to test out his chops on a professional set.
“Tina Fey was on set almost every day, and there was one scene in particular that I just was feeling like was not funny, and I’m pretty sure everybody else was feeling like it was not funny,” Briney recalls with a self-deprecating laugh. “She just came up and was spitballing ideas to make it funny, and I think it sort of worked out in the end. So there’s people that were funnier than me telling me how to be funny.”
As for what will happen beyond the sun-kissed shores of Cousins, Briney certainly won’t eschew any opportunities to play into his newfound status as a romantic leading man, but the actor seems eager to prove his mettle in a variety of genres.
“I think my heart will always fall in the world of independent film because that’s sort of the reason I fell in love with the art form of acting in movies,” Briney says with a bashful smile. “TV and movies sort of blend in interesting ways now, but that’s where I fell in love with it. So if I could sort of work in that world, I’d be a very, very happy man.”
