Spoilers ahead for The Summer I Turned Pretty season three.
“Hey, friend,” breakout Summer I Turned Pretty star Isabella Briggs says in a gentle voice. “I’m gonna put you over here. Is that okay?” She’s speaking to an unidentified bug, using a spoon to carefully scoop the critter off the edge of my plate before depositing it onto a nearby surface.
The 25-year-old is navigating the minor indignities of dining al fresco at Café Paulette, a small French restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It’s roughly a week before The Summer I Turned Pretty’s hotly anticipated series finale—the conclusion to Briggs’s breakout arc as Denise, an ambitious senior associate at Breaker Capital, the company cofounded by the father (Tom Everett Scott) of Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno). But between sips of an oat milk cappuccino, Briggs appears utterly serene—and careful with even the most inconvenient insects.
She has long welcomed the unexpected. A graduate of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, Briggs saw her early career derailed first by the pandemic, during her sophomore year of college, and then by the dual writers and actors strikes of 2023. Her turn as Denise, a character created specifically for the final season and not featured in Jenny Han’s best-selling YA book trilogy, is the long-awaited exhale after years of uncertainty. “I’m happy that people feel seen by her,” says Briggs, adjusting the pair of dark sunglasses sitting atop her head. Despite being referred to as a “Shiv Roy wannabe” who “eats finance bros for breakfast” by some of the show’s other characters, “she isn’t just this sardonic, one-note badass corporate girl,” says Briggs. “She has feelings and opinions—she’s loved and lost.”
But Denise’s days of romantic strife may be over. In the Prime Video series’ finale, her character couples up with Jeremiah in the months after his wedding to Belly (Lola Tung) is called off. Briggs learned shortly after filming began that her character was destined to end up with the younger Fisher brother. “Jenny sat me down and told me where the arc was going, and I was shocked,” says the actor, who revealed the spoiler to only her mother and boyfriend. Briggs says that cast members received the season’s scripts two at a time—and that all of the Paris-set portions of the final two episodes were blacked out from the versions she received.
Although I am privy to the spoiler before our first conversation, Briggs plays coy about Denise and Jeremiah until our official post-finale Zoom call. There, she shares her theory on when things became romantic between the former coworkers and temporary roommates. “Initially, she did find him attractive, but obviously he was engaged and she didn’t take him seriously,” says Briggs. “So she was rather reserved and slightly antagonistic around him.”
As the first person in her family to go to college, Denise is weary of the familial advantages enjoyed by “nepo baby” Jeremiah and her fellow coworker Steven (Sean Kaufman), Belly’s older brother. “She’s had to work twice as hard to get into any room,” says Briggs, “which is why I think she passes such harsh judgment on Steven and Jeremiah. That’s a fear of hers—these guys waltz in, and in six months, they’re [her] boss…. But once Denise gets to know both Steven and Jeremiah, she releases that resentment because she admits to seeing the good, the talent, the passion in them.”
Witnessing that ambition is also what leads Denise to confess her attraction to Jeremiah in the final episode. “Talent and passion are so attractive, for Denise especially,” says Briggs. “When I was diving into why she chose to go into venture capital, I determined that she was really passionate about early-stage [venture capital] because that’s where you get in on the ground floor and facilitate growth. Now she sees Jeremiah transforming this passion [for cooking] into a viable career path, and she wants to help facilitate.”
In the lead-up to this surprising conclusion, Briggs says, she’s had mainly positive fan interactions. “Knock on wood, haven’t got any weirdos,” she jokes, though she admits that Jeremiah has garnered some backlash for his onscreen actions—prompting the series to issue its impassioned audience stern anti-bullying guidance. “I feel defensive for all the characters,” Briggs says when I ask if she feels protective of Jeremiah. “I just want people to have empathy, but I understand any good art is going to make you have opinions.” Although she didn’t see all of the memes about Jeremiah’s love for a certain dark chocolate mirror glaze cake coming. She saw the cake mentioned in a script, but “I think I just glazed over it,” Briggs says, stopping to chuckle: “I glazed over it.”
Raised an only child by her lawyer father (“He wanted me to be a lawyer. Apologies, dad…. I’ll play a lawyer on TV.”) and stay-at-home mother in Los Angeles, Briggs fell in love with acting as a young child while watching the swashbuckling adventures of Pirates of the Caribbean. “I begged my parents for years to let me do it. And of course they’re not going to take the whims of a three-year-old seriously,” Briggs says. “I was also saying that I wanted to be the president and a veterinarian at the time.”
Her parents finally relented, enrolling Briggs in her first acting class at age six. She began to book commercials and print work the following year, but never made it big. “Growing up in LA and being a child actor, you’re mostly going up for Disney stuff,” Briggs says. “But I would always get the note, ‘She’s just not Disney.’ I always had this knowledge that my career was really going to start later on in life, which I’m so happy about. I feel so much more prepared for it now. I’m also a much better actor now. And I’m happy that I had a normal childhood.” One that included her own teenage trip to Paris (“I probably wore a beret and the French were probably pissed off at me for doing that”) and a Summer I Turned Pretty–esque devotion to Gossip Girl (“I’ve rewatched it 10 times at the very least”).
Briggs later ventured out of her actor-saturated bubble in the Valley, applying only to colleges on the East Coast and in London. “Similarly to what Miss Belly is doing in Paris,” she says, “I just took the leap and didn’t look back.” Her schooling at Carnegie Mellon was followed by roles on Paramount+’s Fatal Attraction, Apple TV+’s Sugar, and CBS’s Evil. Briggs credits her mother for driving her to auditions and keeping the hope alive. Although they currently live on opposite coasts, they watched each episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty together over FaceTime. Was she Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah? “She’s team Denise,” Briggs says proudly.
In the series finale, Denise and Steven make plans to start their own company in San Francisco. While Steven’s longtime on-and-off girlfriend, Taylor (Rain Spencer), will make the move with them, it’s still early days for Denise and Jeremiah. “I really loved the fact that we’re not seeing Denise and Jeremiah in a full-fledged relationship at the end,” Briggs says. “We’re not seeing something that’s fully bloomed; we’re seeing the bud—the spark…. I don’t imagine that they’re trying to rush into anything. But I would hope that they explore their connection and still talk and visit each other while also uplifting each other’s independent journeys.”
A Summer I Turned Pretty follow-up movie was slyly announced shortly after our second chat. Briggs doesn’t spill the beans on that development, but shares that she would be open to reprising her character in some capacity. “I would love for her, honestly, to interact more with Belly and Conrad…. Especially since Conrad’s still out in California going to medical school,” Briggs says. “I love both Chris and Lola so much, so the times that we were able to work together, that was wonderful.”
During filming, Briggs made a Denise-inspired playlist with songs by Esperanza Spalding and Nina Simone—the latter’s soulful track “Feeling Good” particularly resonated when it came to Denise and Jeremiah’s burgeoning romance. It’s a new dawn and a new day for Briggs too. She dreams of appearing in the next project from Watchmen and Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof and has an affinity for other surrealist shows like Julio Torres’s HBO series Fantasmas and Showtime’s short-lived Jim Carrey vehicle, Kidding. But Briggs’s ultimate inspiration is two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone: “She has such a brilliant range. Legendary status is really what she’s building toward. I love her partnership with Yorgos Lanthimos. What they create together is just so fun and fresh every time.”
And she’s ready to embrace any critters that may cross her path along the way. “Let ’em live,” Briggs says with a little shrug, eyeing the bee that hovers over our cleared table. “A cold winter is coming, so you know what? They might as well enjoy it while they can.” After all, summer can’t last forever.
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