TikTok superstar Noah Beck doesn’t know why he’s famous, but is making the best of it

NEW YORK – Noah Beck’s first TikTok post was a flop.

While home in Arizona, during winter break from the University of Portland in 2020, his sister Tatum introduced him to TikTok.

“She had, like, 8,000 followers and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a lot,’” he said.

“I was the annoying little brother who was like, ‘I bet you in two weeks, I’ll have more followers than you.’”

He posted two videos, including a nine-second one in which he lip-synced vulgar rap lyrics from a Megan Thee Stallion song. Shot in his bedroom with an iPhone, it had all the mundane markings of a suburban teenager’s life: white T-shirt, floppy hair, string lights, walls covered with photos and posters.

It went nowhere.

But a few months later, when the pandemic shut down campus life everywhere, the video mysteriously took off. “When I woke up, I had 20,000 followers. And each video had, like, 300,000 views. I thought it was a glitch,” he said.

Today, the 21-year-old has more than 34 million followers on TikTok, putting him a bit behind American reality television star Kylie Jenner (49.1 million) and his former girlfriend, American singer-social media personality Dixie D’Amelio (57.5 million).

He has gone from being an anonymous college student training to be a professional soccer player to a TikTok superstar who, in recent months, sat in the front row at Paris Fashion Week, wore a white tuxedo to the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Top Gun: Maverick, modelled for AMI Paris and played in a celebrity soccer match for Unicef.

He is not only recognised on the street by Gen Z fans, but also by celebrities. When he was introduced to stars such as American actor Mark Wahlberg and Canadian rapper Drake, they often said the same thing: “I know who you are.”

“Drake knew who I was,” he said. “Unreal.”

Beck is now using that recognition as a springboard into avenues of fame.

In January, he signed with the Creative Artists Agency and will star in The QB Bad Boy And Me that is scheduled to begin filming in a few months. He is also a producer of the movie, which is a project from Creator Plus, a company that specialises in films with social media stars.

“It’s pretty surreal that you are doing something just for the fun of it and people are following you,” he said. “While I have these opportunities, I’m going to make the best of it.”

Like many social media stars, he has no discernible skills or talent to explain his meteoric rise. He does not sing, his dancing is standard fare, his acting is untested and his brand of humour is not particularly edgy.

His popularity, it could be argued, comes from being an everyday bro who turns the drudgery of daily life into short videos. And as his mostly young and female fans can attest, it does not hurt that he is conventionally handsome, has an easy smile, is built like a soccer player and looks good without a shirt.

“I gained a lot of fans because of my abs, as ridiculous as it sounds,” he said. “A lot of people started to follow me because I danced with my shirt off and I kind of ran with that.”

Being shirtless, however, can get you only so far.

His fame got a huge boost in May 2020 when he was vacationing with his family in Newport Beach, California. Members of the Sway House, a content creator “collab house” in Los Angeles, liked his content and invited him over.

It was around that time that he met D’Amelio, who was dating another Sway House member, Griffin Johnson.

Beck and D’Amelio are cagey about their relationship – including when they became a couple – which is paradoxical, considering that they built their brands by oversharing. Even now, they are rarely seen publicly together.

And while Gen Z followers cannot seem to get enough – videos tagged “Doah” (short for Dixie and Noah) have more than 1.7 billion views on TikTok – they may be disappointed (or thrilled) to learn that the couple have since broken up.

Getting views is no longer enough for Beck. “I want to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “I want to really explore the fashion world. I want to stay in the world of soccer. I can’t get away from soccer; it’s my life. And I want to try acting.”

In preparation for The QB Bad Boy And Me, he has hired a series of acting coaches. The experience has been humbling. “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s not what I expected.”

Beck is still very active on social media: He has nine million followers on Instagram, nearly two million on YouTube and five million on Triller, as well as a podcast called Put A Sock In It.

He insists that fame has not gone to his head. He drives a 2016 black Nissan Ultima. “It gets me from Point A to Point B. And it’s safe,” he said.

He plays Fortnite several hours a week with his college soccer buddies and geeks out over TV series Game Of Thrones. And he does not drink, preferring amusement parks over nightclubs.

When asked why millions of people find him captivating, he still struggles to answer.

“I ask myself that all the time,” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m in Europe and I’m looking out the window, and there’re hundreds of fans waiting for me outside the lobby, I’m like, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

“I want to go down and survey them, not fishing for compliments, just genuinely ask, ‘Why do you enjoy my content?’” NYTIMES