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 onto 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, her also TikTok-famous sister Dixie, and their parents have 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’Amelio Show (it was cancelled 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 mega pop 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.”
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