"This is not what it looks like!" Noah Beck screams at a group of teenagers in the distance. We are eating breakfast at a restaurant in Southampton, New York, and the 20-year-old Beck, who with almost 30 million followers is one of the most popular men on the social media platform TikTok, is playing with a bowl of oatmeal and peanut butter. Beck’s big smile is noticeably white, and even though he’s known for his chiseled abdominal muscles, he’s somehow even more swole in real life—I feel every muscle when he embraces me. As three young women make their way toward us, Beck raises his voice for a second time: "People are going to assume we're on a date!"
Beck is anxious about being seen with a woman because he is in a well-documented relationship with the social media personality Dixie D'Amelio (54 million followers), who is the older sister of Charli D'Amelio, who is the most followed (over 120 million) person on TikTok. The couple’s fans monitor their relationship obsessively, searching for clues to its status within the most seemingly innocuous videos. Beck tells me that this is his first interview without his manager present, and he boasts that he is not media trained.
Beck has been camped out, mostly shirtless, by a pool in a Hamptons house for the past few days with two other famous male TikTokers, Blake Gray (almost 10 million followers) and Bryce Hall (around 21 million). The stay is courtesy of the probiotic soda brand Poppi, whose logo appears all over the house and the videos that the trio produce there. Communal living (and posting) is, of course, a social media creator thing: The three young men used to live with six more of TikTok’s most prominent male stars in the now-disbanded Sway House, a 8,500-square-foot Bel Air mansion.
"Where is Bryce?" one of the teens giggles as she takes out her phone and starts filming Beck. "Did you guys go there last night?" she asks, referring to a party in Southampton. Beck looks down, moves his hands back to his fixed hair, and adjusts his posture, instinctively getting ready to be photographed. "It looked like Diplo was there," says another teenager. "We should have went!" says another as she storms off.
The concept of overnight fame, and the hard work that comes before it, is core to entertainment industry mythology. But no fame has been as overnight, or as serendipitous, as TikTok fame. Olivia Rodrigo was the star of a Disney show before “Drivers License” hit worldwide; Noah Beck was a NCAA Division-1 soccer player at the University of Portland before he joined TikTok in January 2020. His first post was a nine-second black-and-white video in which he lip-synched a lewd verse by the rapper DaBaby, from Megan Thee Stallion’s “Cash Shit.”
Beck tells me that he woke up the next day to "over 20,000 followers," who skewed "young" and "mostly female." A few weeks later, while on vacation with his family in Mission Beach, California, he posted a series of mostly shirtless dances from a beachfront Airbnb. After that weekend, he had almost 3 million followers. "I did a dance out there that got like 30 million views, and I was like, what the fuck?” Beck says. Now, he’s just back from a private jet trip to Paris Fashion Week, and is about to make an appearance at MLB All-Star Week. There are a few men with more followers on TikTok, like Will Smith (60 million) and Brent Rivera (40.2 million), but none quite as pure as Beck, in the sense that most of them got famous for doing something else, whereas Beck is a product of the platform and his performance is himself.
According to a 2019 poll that was treated as a harbinger of the apocalypse at the time, a stunning 86% of young Americans want to be influencers—but only 12% considered themselves to have made it. The term influencer may slowly be receding as the equally amorphous creator rises, but the goal remains the same: making a lot of money via your ability to harness online attention. How did Beck find his place, without really trying or wanting to, at the vanguard of the latest iteration of fame in America?
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First, his timing was perfect. Beck is part of a cohort of TikTok-famous young adults who amassed huge followings during the early days of the pandemic, when the app more than doubled its user base while large numbers of Americans stayed home, looking at their phones. What distinguishes TikTok from other social media platforms is its algorithm: Facebook and Instagram are still tethered to the idea that people want to see content from their friends first, whereas TikTok pushes popular videos at users on the For You page, a public feed that increases their reach exponentially.
Most of TikTok’s biggest stars are young, white, and conventionally attractive, which can be attributed to the collaborative filtering methods used by all social media platforms (“People who tend to like blonde teens tend to like a whole lot of other blonde teens,” as Marc Faddoul, a researcher at UC Berkeley, told BuzzFeed) and the way in which, according to many Black creators, elements of TikTok’s algorithm have the effect of suppressing their content.
When the first surge of young women responded to Beck, the algorithm was primed to push his next videos at hundreds of thousands more people worldwide who’d never heard of him before. Hannah Kosh, a popular TikToker who posts constant news updates about the platform and its stars, remembers, “I literally have a video that was like, who is this curly-haired tall drink of water? Three days later he had 5 million followers.”
The history of the internet is littered with one-hit wonders, however. “Tons of creators go viral, earn a following, and then hit a threshold where they stop growing and their views decline,” says Kate Lindsay, who cowrites Embedded, a newsletter about internet culture. “TikTok is all about newer, bigger, better. The people who are able to sustain their popularity do so because they appeal to that—they collab, they have scandals, they release a product.”
Beck had established his style early: trending lip-synchs and shirtless thirst traps. Next came the collab. After his Mission Beach blow-up, he received a direct message invitation via Instagram to visit the Sway House from new member Blake Gray, who made his bones on YouTube before jumping on the TikTok wave. Collab houses, as they’re known, collect popular creators together like a reality television cast, allowing them to compound one another’s followings and grow together at a rapid pace—if you follow one house member, the app will likely recommend another.
Beck needed some time to figure out how to explain TikTok to his soccer coach dad and second-grade teacher mom, but he walked away from his sports scholarship and officially joined the Sway House last summer, where his numbers quickly outstripped those of the other house members. "It's still crazy to think, because I have all these guys that have been in social media for years, and they're like, 'Dude, you are the fastest-growing male TikToker or male social media influencer ever,’” says Beck, stopping to add more peanut butter to his oatmeal.
Sway House, which was formed by the management agency TalentX in January 2019, became well-known for the antics of its members, who annoyed their neighbors, hung out in the street, fired paintball guns, and generally partied hard. In February, the House announced its breakup, seemingly so the members could go their own ways. “Sway is in a weird spot. It’s not a house [anymore]. All the boys are off doing their own things,” Beck explains. “I want to get back into soccer, Blake talks about doing real estate, and Bryce is an entertainer; he will do what he wants.”
Sway’s biggest rival for House supremacy was the Hype House, also based in Los Angeles. Historically, the two houses didn’t work together—at one point, a group of Sway House stars marched on Hype House after hours of the two camps beefing online—but Beck made peace in true creator fashion: by making content with his rivals, including the D’Amelio sisters. At the time, Dixie D’Amelio was in a relationship with another Sway House resident, Griffin Johnson, but that didn’t stop fans from fantasizing about them as a couple. "I was like, I don't want to make this weird for anyone," Beck says. But he confirms now that he "never had a good relationship" with Johnson, and says that at one point he and Dixie stopped making videos together "out of respect to her relationship.”
By the end of the summer, D’Amelio had announced her breakup with Johnson, in a video that now has over 12 million views. To Beck, the split felt inevitable: "I don't know everything about girls—no one does. But I would see the way that they were together, and I was like, this doesn't seem like they want to be around each other, and it doesn't seem real, to be honest." A few weeks after that, Beck and D'Amelio went public with their relationship, but only after stoking intrigue with a music video and a flirtatious YouTube video that sparked various theories. The power law of celebrity relationships, in which two parties combine to make a more famous sum, applies as much to TikTok as to Hollywood, but Beck swears, “I don't want to use Dixie for clout. I could care less about that. I love her for her.”
"The reason I love Dixie so much is that she's my best friend, and when we hang out, I just feel like I'm hanging out with my friend, but she's also...she's very attractive," he explains with a laugh. “I always tell her she has a dry sense of humor. She'll make a joke and not laugh, whereas I have golden retriever energy.” When I ask Dixie over email what she loves the most about Noah, she writes, “Noah gives attention to everyone else before himself. He’s always making sure everyone else is comfortable and happy. No matter who they are and if he knows them well or not. It’s super sweet how selfless he is always.” Their special date night: driving to the beach in Malibu for a picnic under the stars.
Beck spent the rest of lockdown going back and forth between a new apartment with YouTube-ready jungle wallpaper, and hanging out with other popular creators: Lil Huddy, Larray (“one of my best friends”), and James Charles, who has since lost massive numbers of followers and brand deals after being accused of grooming multiple minors and sued for wrongful termination by a former producer on his team (Charles claimed the boys he spoke with had told him they were 18, and the producer was blackmailing him). When Beck tries to articulate the state of his friendship with Charles now, he explains: “As much as I want to be open about it, there's not much I can say, because people are so closed-minded. I haven't spoken with James about it. I haven't been like, Yo, did you do it? I'm not going to do that.” He continues, “I'm just like, Look, I know you, and I know who you are as a person. I know you'll be back soon. It's just a matter of time. You're not canceled. No one ever gets canceled.”
Beck’s own brushes with controversy have been minor. He denied hitting on another TikToker while with Dixie; there were charges of queerbaiting after he wore fishnets on the cover of a magazine. “I had to come out as straight!” he says of the rumors about him being queer, which he tells me he regretted acknowledging online altogether. He’s been in the vicinity of scandal—like the time Hall pranked him with strippers, earning the disapproval of D’Amelio’s mother, or when Hall and Gray allegedly cause a public nuisance by throwing parties in the middle of the pandemic, or the day Hall was arrested on marijuana charges—but remained untouched by it.
This is by design: Beck is the product, and he has a position in the marketplace to maintain. Beck’s manager, Maxwell Mitcheson, who is vice president and head of talent at TalentX, says that they "decided early on that Noah's brand is the friendly boy next door who is brand-safe. Those are two of the main pillars of Noah Beck's IP.”
Beck also describes himself in these terms. "I can't be in too many videos with [Sway House members], because brands will see that and they're like, ‘Oh, well, you're doing this with Bryce, and he's not very, like, brand-safe,’” he says. In the week after our interview, he posted snippets from Arizona with his family, followed by a series of posts from his trip to Paris with the fashion brand Ami. "[Some creators] care more about their image online, rather than trying to capitalize on all the money they could bring in if they were brand-safe," he says.
"I'm very open with myself and my story and the things I do on a day-to-day basis on the internet. I'm going to tell the truth and my truth, and if people don't like that, then unfollow me," Beck says decisively. "I'm still a Sway boy, but at the same time, I am my own person. It's good to have your own brand, and when fans come up, they are usually not Sway fans. They're just Noah Beck fans. And that's the coolest thing, because they love the positive, innocent, and kind side of TikTok."
Nevertheless, 30 million followers watching your every move daily on their phones comes with pressure. Kosh thinks part of TikTok’s appeal is that it feels more intimate than earlier forms of entertainment. “With paparazzi pictures, you might see [stars] spotted on the streets,” she says, “but this is a firsthand look into the day-in and day-out of their actual life and their relationships. So I think people feel more connected and involved.”
Mitcheson says there’s “a misconception” around how hard top creators on TikTok work. “There's a rigorous calendar that they all have for their content. They're constantly deep in analytics and algorithms. They're shooting hundreds of videos that you don't see there.” On top of that, he adds, “I think there is a general fear among all of these TikTok stars and creators of being canceled for saying the wrong thing or posting the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing.”
Beck doesn’t seem to be too worried about cancellation, telling me that “people use the term cancel, but it literally only boosts their views. It just makes you more relevant. People are ridiculous by thinking they have that power to do that.” Even a TikTok trend making fun of his neck size grew his following. "It took a toll," he says, but he learned to let it go. "At the end of the day, I just laughed about it, because the more people are making these memes, the more my name's getting out there," he explains.
Still: "Everyone thinks that everything's perfect, and I promise you, I'm going through my shit.... Body dysmorphia is a thing. There have just been times where I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like, ‘Fuck.’ I'm not playing soccer, and I'm not running every single day." Beck admits that "growing up, I never had depression. I never had anxiety. If I did ever feel sad growing up, I played soccer or talked to my friends, and I would forget about it. Social media has definitely developed some of those things for me, and I'm battling my own stuff every single day.” He adds, “I went viral, kept going viral, and now I'm here. People are so jealous of the top influencers on TikTok because they feel that they are so close to being that. People are like, ‘All I need is a couple of videos, and I can be living that life…’ It’s not like that.”
Another fan is asking for Beck’s attention. This time it’s a mother who has approached us to take a picture with her daughter. Beck gets up from our table to meet her. "I'm trying to take advantage of everything I can while I have this platform. I don't think my followers will just go away one day, but they may stop growing this fast," he says after the photo is taken. Who knows how long TikTok will rule? Fletcher Greene, who runs the Hollywood Fix, this generation’s version of Perez Hilton, told me over email, “The TikTok craze is over; that was last year. It’s back to traditional celebs now.” Within minutes, Beck is smiling next to another fan, who starts crying as he walks away. "I'm there for them. I DM fans. I literally pop into fan group chats," he says.
"I may fall off in terms of social media, but I will be totally okay with that if I had no regrets [about] what I did when I had the opportunity that I had," Beck adds as we finish eating. Days after our conversation, he writes to his followers that he and Dixie would like to keep “the majority of our relationship offline for now.” According to one of the largest Doah stan accounts, @noahdixies, the fandom “prepared for the worst'' and “saved videos in the event the couple broke up.” On July 26, however, Beck posted a video of himself lip-synching next to someone who looks like Dixie. The comments streamed in: "I can breathe again," "oh my goodness," "MY PARENTS ARE BACK!!!!"
