Sabrina Brier on Misogyny, Internet Fame and ‘That Friend’

sabrina brier polyester cover 2025 — In 2025, despite internet celebrities walking red carpets and winning awards, there remains a misconception that if you’ve gained a following online – whether for your clothes, your comedy, or your expertise – that fame has found you by accident.
On the one hand, it is true that on a weekly basis, a new main character of TikTok emerges, is quickly handed a fashion campaign, and then, more often than not, fades back into near obscurity. But on the other, there are people like Sabrina Brier.

Brier’s videos satirising our friendships not only manage to cut through the noise - and our millisecond-long attention spans - but also manage to make us feel like her content is so effortless that she’s not trying, leaving many to assume she didn’t earn it.

“The funny thing is, when you enter this world of ‘influencers,’ there’s this perception that you don’t know about the industry,” Sabrina tells me over video call. In reality, the 30-year-old spent the years following her graduation from Smith College working as a Hollywood assistant, as “someone who was dying to audition, but instead, was sitting there editing other people’s self-tapes.”

From assisting an agent (the same person who has now signed her as a client), to working her way up to writers’ rooms, her dream was always to be a showrunner, and building an audience online was never part of the plan. Instead, she coveted access to a deeply cloaked industry marred by gatekeeping. “What’s been interesting for me is that I’ve been so intentional about my career. I had a plan, and the internet wasn’t initially a part of it, but it eventually became a piece of the puzzle,” she reflects now.

Prior to the start of her rise in 2020, Sabrina wasn’t exactly chronically online. “I was terrified of committing to a post where people could actually see me, and especially my face. I wasn’t doing Instagram stories or documenting my life like a lot of people do. I was way too self-conscious for that.” Sabrina would watch other people putting themselves out there on the internet – posting the types of videos that have now earned her over 800,000 followers – and both wonder how they had the confidence to hit post, and feel jealous that they could and she couldn’t. Now, she understands the impulse: “I always tell people, if you feel that little competitive twinge of jealousy when you see someone doing something you want to do, it’s a sign. If you see someone posting sketches and feel jealous, that probably means you want to post your own sketches. It’s an indicator of something you really want to do.”

Eventually she sucked it up and began posting, and the results she had hoped for came: her short skits calling out the uncomfortable truth of female friendship, from ‘That friend who thinks shes SUCH a good friend’ to ‘That friend who HATES her boyfriend's bestie” resonated so much, and become such a part of our internet lexicon that she’s a reaction meme.

“If you feel that little competitive twinge of jealousy when you see someone doing something you want to do, it’s a sign. It’s an indicator of something you really want to do.”

This probably goes some way to explaining why, when sitting with Sabrina outside a Williamsburg wine bar, I lose count of the people stopping to double take at seeing the people’s princess IRL: her influence is permeating beyond our phone screens. Following a cameo on Abbott Elementary, she’s released her first major long form project, an audiobook entitled ‘That Friend’, featuring cameos from Rachel Zegler, Lukas Gage, Nicola Coughlan and more.

Following her namesake character, Sabrina, ‘That Friend’ tells the story of a wannabe podcaster navigating life alongside her four besties in New York City, and is already being developed for TV. So while her plan may not have initially involved online fame, she was clever enough to realise that, in her words, she “might not be able to achieve everything I wanted in traditional ways without this kind of online exposure.”

We still see the ‘real’ fame vs online fame binary as one that asserts who ‘deserves’ our attention and who doesn’t. But in reality, Sabrina has used her experience in one world to influence the other. “Let’s not overlook the value of this internet experience. I’ve learned so much creatively from it,” she says. “I took that knowledge into my first long-form project and felt how the foundation of being a writer’s assistant – along with the entertainment and comedic instincts I developed online – came together.”

Sabrina calls her online work ‘bootcamp’ for being a showrunner, helping her develop a set of decision making skills that would have taken decades of traditional experience to build up. Not only that, but her online audience provides a feedback incubator that has allowed her to not only gain confidence in her material, but in herself. “Filming out on the street and not caring that I look like a total lunatic – people staring at me, judging me – has been such solid exposure therapy. It’s like, if you really want to perform, you have to throw all that out the window. All the shame, all the self-consciousness.”

Her videos tap into a universal experience women all face: the messiness of our relationships with each other. Though they are comedic in nature, it's clear that she takes friendship extremely seriously; whether that's isolating the minutiae for a short form video, or pulling at the thread of group dynamics in her audiobook. “Being a sister, and especially a younger sister, has always been a huge part of who I am, and I think it shaped my understanding of relationships.”

Sabrina credits her sister for not only basically being her stylist, best friend, and confidant, but the person who initially urged her to just press the post button. She tells me that their relationship “gave me this deep comfort in spaces with like-minded women – women who might bicker with or challenge each other, but at the core, would do anything for each other. To me, there’s such a unique vulnerability in that, something you can’t get from other relationships.”

Despite a wealth of already existing media ploughing through the ups and downs of our friendships – from Girls to and Sex and The City, amongst countless others not based in Sabrina’s home of New York – the way we treat each other is still so often minimised in importance by society at large. “As you get older, you start to understand more about your place in the world. You experience misogyny and see how deeply ingrained it is in all aspects of life - social situations, romantic situations, family dynamics, everything. For me, female friendship has been a source of comfort through all of that. But it’s also a really complex dynamic, which makes it interesting to write about. Because when we’re all facing the battles we do in the world, it’s easy to take that out on each other.”

“As you get older, you experience misogyny and see how deeply ingrained it is in all aspects of life. For me, female friendship has been a source of comfort through all of that.”

Our lives are so often reduced to ‘girl problems’; both on screen and off, our fights dismissed as juvenile and our problems reduced to gossip. She wants those who listen to her audiobook “to feel less alone, to feel catharsis, and to realise they aren’t the only ones going through similar struggles. If they can laugh at themselves while going through it, and feel comforted knowing others are experiencing the same things – that would be the dream.” While we may now have personal essays proclaiming our friends to be the loves of our lives, it can feel like that in declaring the importance of these relationships we seek to minimise the more difficult parts. But Sabrina’s work shows us that the way we relate to each other can be tragic, hilarious, and defining. The most seminal relationship we have may be our besties, but that doesn’t mean they don’t drive us insane, too.

Sabrina Brier on Misogyny, Internet Fame and ‘That Friend’

“If you feel that little competitive twinge of jealousy when you see someone doing something you want to do, it’s a sign. It’s an indicator of something you really want to do.”

“As you get older, you experience misogyny and see how deeply ingrained it is in all aspects of life. For me, female friendship has been a source of comfort through all of that.”

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