When the woman, a young dancer, drapes herself across her bed, her boyfriend, a college football player, kneels beside her. They’re on the verge of a fight, but he dissipates the tension by looking her up and down with soulful eyes and telling her she’s beautiful. When she sternly tells him not to smile at her like that, he grins even wider. “Why?” he says. “‘Cause it’s working?” He winks.

The scene from Sidelined 2: Intercepted is typical for the sequel of any young adult romance movie — the two college freshmen who have fallen in love have to learn how to balance their feelings for each other with their ambitions. What sets this movie apart is that its star is Noah Beck, a TikToker with a whopping 33 million followers who first gained notoriety for posting short, smoldering clips, in which he was often shirtless. He does this over and over in the film and its predecessor, Sidelined: The QB & Me, which drove the most new viewers to the free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi of any title on the platform ever when it premiered last year.

Some might call Beck a professional thirst trapper — someone who shares flirty but staged posts for the likes — who is trying to capitalize on his 15 minutes of fame. But I’d argue that Beck has harnessed his TikTok fame into something much more potentially durable that represents a new breed of influencer-celebrity. You may have never heard of him, but millions have, and his early career is starting to look a lot like the trajectories of contemporaries like Jacob Elordi and Noah Centineo. It begs the question: Why not Noah Beck?

Beck has navigated the TikTok-to-screen star transition by finding the perfect role for himself — something not so different from his own life. It offers satisfying wish fulfillment to the people already thirsting for him, and it introduces new fans to a celebrity who, after years of chronic posting, appears charmingly accessible and has an extensive digital backlog to dive into.

Beck tells Yahoo that acting isn’t a lark for him. Social media is great, but being on set is the “most magical experience,” he says — akin to playing a team sport, which he’s done nearly all his life.

“I was craving something creatively that wasn't so self-indulgent, if that's OK to say,” he says. “That collaborativeness, it filled me creatively in a way that social media just wasn't for a while. … I'm really happy that I ended up loving acting. If I didn't, I would still be searching for something.”

Classic boy-next-door appeal, retooled for the social media age

When Beck was first breaking out on social media, he was a part of Sway House, a gaggle of muscular bros who lived and made content together from 2020 to 2021. Beck was the good-hearted golden retriever of the bunch — and he still gives off that vibe. Members like Bryce Hall and Griffin Johnson ruled over TikTok during a lonely pandemic era, but now, Beck has 10 million more followers than any of them. The fact that he dated Dixie D’Amelio, one of the most followed TikTokers of all time, probably had something to do with it, too — he frequently appeared as a side character in her videos.

In many ways, starring in the Sidelined movies is an extension of that existing brand. Beck tells Yahoo that he’s “a sucker” for rom-coms because he grew up with two older sisters. “I’m a hopeless romantic at heart,” he says.

When I ask Beck whether he deploys his TikTok moves and persona when acting, he deflects by talking about how social media made him more comfortable on camera. Nonetheless, he cycles through the motions for me — laughing, hanging his head and looking back up at me while effortlessly smoldering. It all comes pretty naturally.

Studios have long been intrigued by how they can use actors with social media followings to promote the films they star in, but Beck is one of the few to actually succeed. With other social media stars, the transition to mainstream celebrity can feel inauthentic. Beck’s TikTok peer Addison Rae, now a Grammy-nominated artist, led a romantic comedy of her own — Netflix’s gender-swapped reboot of She’s All That in 2021. It felt forced, like Hollywood was trying to make her happen to save itself from being obscured by social media.

That’s where Beck’s aggressively likable and nonthreatening persona comes in handy. “He's nailed the pretty-boy-next-door athlete aesthetic and turned his followership into trust — and trust travels across platforms and formats,” Riley Gardiner, founder of No Strings Public Relations, tells Yahoo.

Jess Rauchberg, an academic expert on influencer culture and assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, also says Beck’s superpower is combining his soft boy-next-door persona with razor-sharp good looks. Beck’s success “makes me think about how physical appearance … can be leveraged to generate a whole career,” Rauchberg says. “Models are no longer just models; they are figures who now sell us ideas on how to ‘be.’”

The boy-next-door archetype, of course, is nothing new. Rauchberg says Beck’s fame reminds her of teen entertainment and tabloid media of the 1990s and 2000s, when there was a substantial tween and teen market for outlets like Tiger Beat and J-14, which frequently covered Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber.

In Sidelined, Beck finds the perfect role

The Sidelined movies are like Hallmark movies for tweens, but a little sexier, much like Netflix’s The Kissing Booth trilogy that made Oscar hopeful Elordi a star, or Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty series that turned Christopher Briney into a sex symbol.

Beck knows that playing Drayton in the Sidelined movies isn’t too far from playing himself. He, too, was a college athlete — a soccer player — but his tenure was cut short because of the pandemic. Since then, acting has become a new passion.

“I was just trying to be as much of a sponge as I could be, and being present to the point where it went by like this,” he says of his time on set, snapping to punctuate the last word.

With the second movie, he felt his athletic drive pushing him to improve, he says. His role “felt more lived in. The character felt more marinated. I learned a lot more about Drayton in the second one simply due to thinking his thoughts for longer.”

In some ways, the source material seems engineered for Beck. The two films of what’s sure to be at least a trilogy are adapted from a popular work of original fiction on the self-publishing site Wattpad. It invites readers to live vicariously through hardworking dancer Dallas, as she reluctantly falls for bad boy quarterback Drayton.

In the sequel, as the title suggests, things get complicated for the young couple, because of distance and other unforeseen circumstances. A second love interest, an artsy, mulleted barista named Skyler who looks suspiciously like Elordi, appears, creating the quintessential YA romance love triangle.

It’s not technically fan fiction, though it leans into many of the same plot devices and character archetypes that have created the classic Wattpad formula: A good girl meets a bad boy who changes his ways for her. That’s not a dig — there are five After movies adapted from Wattpad fan fiction about singer Harry Styles. 50 Shades of Grey is Twilight fan fiction. People want what they want.

Tay Marley, who wrote the original Wattpad story that Sidelined was based on, often tackles deep, emotional topics, such as grief, in her work. She diverged with this one, which was originally titled The QB Bad Boy and Me, to have a bit of fun and try to cater to what was popular on the site at the time.

In her writing, Marley imagined Drayton as Cody Christian, an actor from MTV’s Teen Wolf series. When she found out Beck would be playing her romantic lead, she recognized him immediately due to his presence on TikTok and felt an immediate sense of relief.

“I thought he suited the character so much ... he’s got the perfect look and personality and everything,” she says.

Days before the Sidelined sequel premiered, Tubi announced another young adult romance movie — How to Lose a Popularity Contest, starring Beck’s thirst-trapping TikTok peer (and fellow ex-boyfriend of a D’Amelio sister) Chase Hudson. It follows a “charming underachiever and type-A overachiever teaming up to win student body president — and maybe each other.”

Plenty of influencer-led films have come and gone with little fanfare, but Tubi seems to be sticking to its strategy of featuring hunky human golden retrievers in its YA fare. More wish-fulfillment fantasies starring social media personalities could soon be coming to a medium-sized screen near you. Is it a passing trend, or a budding genre that begets an entire new class of fame? I wouldn’t discount the latter.