At a efficiency of the Broadway musical &Juliet late final 12 months, a lot of the viewers’s consideration naturally gravitated towards the present’s stars. However there was a whoop when one ensemble member— Charli D’Amelio—danced onto the stage.
The transient applause, although, was the primary and final time the TikTok phenom (157 million followers and counting) had the highlight. D’Amelio isn’t being shuttled in for a quick run as a star within the present, neither is she filling the kind of stunt casting position that influencers or celebrities usually take on.
As a substitute, D’Amelio is enjoying a member of the refrain named Charmion, dancing and singing with the group of different background performers for the whole lot of the musical. And she or he’s loving it.
“I’ve by no means been happier,” D’Amelio, 20, tells me. “I’m ready to enter the theater each single day and be so fortunate that that is work for me. That is work, and it does not really feel like work.”
It’s an attention-grabbing pivot for D’Amelio, who turned an early social media megastar because of her dance movies on TikTok throughout the pandemic. Since then, D’Amelio, her additionally TikTok-famous sister Dixie, and their mother and father have constructed an leisure profession that’s spectacular by any measure The household (practically 250 million TiKTok followers mixed) starred collectively for 3 seasons on the Hulu actuality present The D’Amelio Present (it was cancelled final June) and D’Amelio competed on after which gained season 31 of Dancing with the Stars in 2022. She’s starred in a number of campaigns for nationwide manufacturers, and by the point she was 18, was the highest-paid TikTok star in keeping with Forbes, with an estimated web value of 23.5 million.
However final 12 months, D’Amelio discovered herself taking a breather. Whereas fellow TikTok stars like Addison Rae have been doing issues like repositioning themselves as essential pop women, D’Amelio puzzled over her future.
“I used to be attempting to determine the place I wished to go subsequent, taking a bit of little bit of a break, doing a few of the stuff I had executed earlier than,” she says. “I actually wished to strive one thing very dance targeted.”
D’Amelio has been dancing since she was three years previous, and had dreamed of following that zeal as a profession. Each alternative she acquired, although, didn’t really feel fairly proper.
“There’s not a whole lot of areas the place dance is the focus,” she says. “It is all the time dancing comes second, otherwise you’re dancing for somebody or for a model. That was a bit of bit troublesome for me, particularly within the kinds that I love to do.”
Then, final summer season, she realized that &Juliet—a feminist retelling of Romeo and Juliet utilizing the music of mega pop producer and songwriter Max Martin—could be holding auditions for a brand new solid. One thing in her intestine advised her this was it, and he or she requested her agent if she may attempt to get her an audition. She secured one, however she was insanely nervous. She instantly started taking voice classes (although she isn’t as well-known for singing, she did launch a single in 2022) and “dancing all day, on daily basis.”
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