A year before he skyrocketed to heartbreaker status and social media fame overnight as the emotionally guarded Conrad Fisher on Amazon Prime Video’s hit young adult series “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” Christopher Briney saw his future change twice in a matter of months.

“I don’t know what I did in a past life to deserve work at all,” Briney, 25, says self-deprecatingly, remembering a time not long ago when he had auditioned for 70 roles trying to land his first job.

The Connecticut native once thought he might become a professional baseball player before the acting bug bit, and he fell in love with film.

“I think the love of doing it, or the prospect of doing it, kept me going because I don’t know what else I would do,” he said.

The first door opened in spring 2021 when director Mary Harron lost a key actor to another project a week into production on the indie drama “Daliland,” about Salvador Dali’s twilight years in 1970s New York City. Suddenly in search of a young star who had smarts, maturity and could hold their own against Ben Kingsley’s Dali, she combed acting-grad show reels and discovered the then-unknown Briney, casting him over Zoom in his film debut as James, an art-world neophyte. The film is now in theaters and available via video on demand.

“He had to look a certain way because the first thing that Salvador Dali says to him is, ‘You look like an angel ... you look like a Renaissance painting,’ ” Harron said in a recent interview. “He had to be someone who had a certain youthful innocence but also wasn’t a pushover. Someone who had certain strength inside, which Chris has as a person.”

Obsessive fans of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which premiered to critical acclaim and TikTok fervor last June, would agree. They’ve already memed and memorized Briney’s every move, line and mannerism as the brooding Conrad, one of two brothers entangled in a love triangle with the show’s teenage heroine, Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung), in the romantic drama series adapted by Jenny Han from her novels. A highly anticipated second season premieres July 14.

Finding stars who shared an electric spark was vital to bringing the popular books to life, and creator-showrunner Han was casting under unusually challenging circumstances during the pandemic. It was shortly after Briney landed in Liverpool, England, for “Daliland” that he got his second break of a lifetime, squeezing a virtual chemistry read with Tung into one of his first days on set.

By the time the film wrapped, he had won the role that would shoot him to Gen Z stardom.

“There’s a lot in Chris’ performance as Conrad that is swimming beneath the surface — there’s so much he wants to say but can’t,” Han wrote in an email of Briney’s quietly simmering work in the role. “He doesn’t have a ton of dialogue, so it has to be conveyed in his eyes, and Chris was able to do that over a Zoom audition, no easy feat. And, at its heart, ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ is a love story, so finding leads with chemistry was one of my biggest priorities. Chris and Lola have an undeniable chemistry on screen. When I saw Chris with Lola, I knew he was the right Conrad.”

Being catapulted into the public eye at such a meteoric speed — and garnering 1.8 million followers on Instagram, where Briney promotes his work alongside more intimate glimpses of his life and inner circle — is an ongoing adjustment. “Being a face on someone’s screen is something that I’m still getting used to,” the actor admits.

Maybe that’s why he finds kinship in his first major roles. Both James, an aspiring curator eager to be among artists in “Daliland,” and Conrad, a teenager struggling with his own buried anxieties on “Summer,” are watchful by nature, like him.

“Being an observer is something that I really enjoy as a human — being an observer, a consumer of art,” he offers. “To be the filter through which people get to see Sir Ben and Dali and his world and Mary’s movie was the most exciting thing for me, to attempt to be the way into the story.”

Serving as “Daliland’s” audience surrogate was a major task, and one Harron admits was a risky bet to place on a new actor. But in Briney’s steady gaze, Harron found oceans of depth and a rare luminosity. “A lot of it is him watching, taking us into these different worlds. You want someone with really good eyes, that are expressive and almost reflective.” I said to (“Daliland” writer and Harron’s husband) John (C. Walsh), ‘It’s like he has a ring light in his eyes’ — they light up. And eyes are everything in screen acting.”

The son of actors who met in New York in the ’80s before moving to Connecticut to raise their children, Briney traces his creative life to seeing theater and film at a young age. He was also keenly aware of his parents’ acting endeavors and the odds against finding success in the industry. “I always knew that they had tried to act and that they loved it, but I wanted to do something different — I wanted to be a little bit of a rebel,” he says with a smile. “I’m not, really.”

Trading pitching dreams for acting courses, Briney found friends and collaborators at Pace University in New York, writing and directing his own short films along the way.

For the immediate future, he’s trying new things. On the film front, he recently wrapped Paramount’s Tina Fey- produced “Mean Girls” musical adaptation, exercising untested comedy chops. “I don’t think I’m much of a tell-jokes kind of a guy,” he says. “It was a new muscle to explore, but I had a great time doing it.”

When “Summer” returns for its second season with a storyline that expands on the second book in Han’s bestselling trilogy, audiences will see Briney unlock new dimensions in his Conrad character. “He’s walking through life with a new lens and being affected by factors that didn’t exist in the first season,” Briney says.

With his first feature finally out in the world, Briney is feeling grateful for the opportunities that have opened up in the last two life-changing years.

“When we were making (‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’), I was like, ‘I just hope one person watches and is really affected by it,’ ” he says. “That’s really all that matters to me. I hope it reaches someone.”