What's a GIRL to Do NEXT?

TOMMY DORFMAN is probably already in your feed.

- BROCK COLYAR

"I GET TO sort of Build-A-Bear my life, and that's really fab," Tommy Dorfman tells me over lunch near her apartment in leafy, low-key brownstone Brooklyn. It's over 90 degrees, and she's feeling "hot, tired, and hormonal," none of which has lessened her appetite, apparently. Her blonde bangs are sticking to the side of her face while she picks at a plate heaping with eggs, veggies, and pita bread, which, when it arrived at the table, inspired her to blurt out, "Wow. Fuck me. Fuck." Then she moves on to a plate of compote-covered French toast. "As you can tell, I eat a lot, and I love sweet things."

Dorfman has always been hungry for more. Born in Atlanta, where she was raised with four older siblings by parents who, she says vaguely, "worked in the car industry," she was one of the breakout stars of the high-school-suicide series 13 Reasons Why, playing Ryan Shaver, the smizey "skinny faggot who writes poems" at Liberty High. It was just the kind of role-a secondary gay on a controversial Netflix series-that could, and did, boost her into the mainstream. Since the second season-her last as a featured character dropped in 2018, she picked up roles in Jane the Virgin, the Lifetime series American Princess, and an episode of Love, Victor and made her stage debut in Jeremy O. Harris's Off-Broadway play Daddy. The pandemic put other potential projects on hold, but she'd already been taken up by the fashion crowd as one of their own (not coincidentally, she was Kaia Gerber’s roommate for a summer). Lockdown gave her the space to become herself at last: the “It” girl, whom everyone is talking about, or something close to it. And now she has a shoe collaboration, too.