Charli D’Amelio on Life in the Broadway Background: ‘I’m the Happiest I’ve Ever Been’
Jenny Anderson
At a performance of the Broadway musical & Juliet late last year, most of the audience’s attention naturally gravitated toward the show’s stars. But there was a whoop when one ensemble member—Charli D’Amelio—danced on to the stage.
The brief applause, though, was the first and last time the TikTok phenom (157 million followers and counting) had the spotlight. D’Amelio isn’t being shuttled in for a brief run as a star in the show, nor is she filling the type of stunt-casting role that influencers or celebrities usually take on.
Instead, D’Amelio is playing a member of the chorus named Charmion, dancing and singing with the group of other background performers for the entirety of the musical. And she’s loving it.
“I’ve never been happier,” D’Amelio, 20, tells me. “I’m able to go into the theater every single day and be so lucky that this is work for me. This is work, and it doesn’t feel like work.”
It’s an interesting pivot for D’Amelio, who became an early social media megastar thanks to her dance videos on TikTok during the pandemic. Since then, D’Amelio—along with her also-TikTok-famous sister, Dixie, and their parents—has built an entertainment career that is impressive by any measure. The family (nearly 250 million TiKTok followers combined) starred together for three seasons on the Hulu reality show The D’melio Show (it was canceled last June), and D’Amelio competed on and then won season 31 of Dancing with the Stars in 2022. She’s starred in several campaigns for national brands, and by the time she was 18, was the highest-paid TikTok star according to Forbes, with an estimated net worth of $23.5 million.
But last year, D’Amelio found herself taking a breather. While fellow TikTok stars like Addison Rae were doing things like repositioning themselves as main pop girls, D’Amelio puzzled over her future.
“I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go next, taking a little bit of a break, doing some of the stuff I had done before,” she says. “I really wanted to try something very dance focused.”
D’Amelio has been dancing since she was three years old, and had dreamed of following that passion as a career. Every opportunity she got, though, didn’t feel quite right.
“There’s not a lot of spaces where dance is the focal point,” she says. “It’s always dancing comes second, or you’re dancing for someone or for a brand. That was a little bit difficult for me, especially in the styles that I like to do.”
Then, last summer, she learned that & Juliet—a feminist retelling of Romeo and Juliet using the music of superstar producer and songwriter Max Martin—would be holding auditions for a new cast. Something in her gut told her this was it, and she asked her agent if she could try and get her an audition. She secured one, but she was insanely nervous. She immediately began taking voice lessons (though she isn’t as well known for singing, she did release a single in 2022) and “dancing all day, every day.”
“I really wanted to make sure I came in prepared, out of respect for the Broadway community and also to ensure I would be putting the best possible audition on the table,” she says.
D’Amelio says her nerves were so shot that she felt lightheaded during her audition, which she describes as “mortifying.” When she got the call she got the role, she burst into tears.
“I immediately called my hometown best friend that I grew up dancing with,” she says. “It was a really incredible moment; getting that support from my friends and this new chapter of my life being so different than anything I’ve ever done before. I think it was the best-case scenario in so many ways for me.”
Once she jumped into rehearsals, she immediately connected with the work and her fellow debut cast members on the show, who, like her, were embarking on something entirely new.
“I definitely didn’t put on my social media cap,” she says. “I was right back to, You are a dancer and you learn the choreography and you work your butt off. At the end of the day, all we’re all trying to accomplish is to put together an amazing show that people love to watch.”
Charli D’Amelio made her debut on October 29, and has already extended her run through April. When she’s not performing, she’s often posting TikToks with her & Juliet castmates (whom she describes as “a family”). Though it can be a balance to find time to do both, D’Amelio has been excited for the support from her followers and enjoys blending the two.
“There is such a strong community of Broadway fans online, and to see that [connection] to people who have only known me from social media is really amazing,” she says. “It is also so fun to show more of the behind-the-scenes of a Broadway show and what the day-to-day looks like for our cast.”
In fact, her career as a social media creator has been better than ever. Leading up to the TikTok ban that wasn’t, D’Amelio began reposting some of her most popular dance videos, gaining her a million new followers.
But when we chatted, D’Amelio gushed primarily about a different sort of connection—one that she gets every night when she gets to look the audience in the eye and watch them applaud. She tears up describing that first night to me, when she sat and took it all in at the end of the second act’s big number (which, if you’re wondering, is Katy Perry’s “Roar”).
“Doing Broadway is not easy, and you can’t just get out there onstage and half-ass it—that’s not how this works,” she says. “This is professional, people pay for tickets. This could be someone’s first show, this could be someone’s only show they ever go to. You perform for everyone there. I really just felt that. I just got to be, I think, the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Originally Appeared on Glamour