ARIANA GREENBLATT Living Her Teenage Dream

THE BARBIE BREAKOUT ACTRESS IS BALANCING THE DOUBLE LIFE OF TEEN STARDOM AND A LEAD ROLE IN BORDERLANDS

- DANIELA AVILA

Days before her shoot with People, Ariana Greenblatt did something that, to the average 16-year-old, would be considered ordinary. She visited the Santa Monica Pier with her friends early in the morning. Wearing her pajamas and a pair of sunglasses she purchased on the pier as her disguise, Greenblatt leaned into the kind of carefree “normal” that came before she became a Disney Channel child star at age 8.

“If I’m in a public setting with a bunch of people, I’m constantly aware,” says Greenblatt, who has 3.6 million followers on TikTok and 3.4 million on Instagram, and is still learning to “balance all the changes” as a rising star, hanging at friends’ houses or at off-the-radar Los Angeles restaurants. “I’ve navigated a way to stay as low-key as possible.”

Greenblatt—best known to the over-25 set as America Ferrera’s angsty teen daughter in last summer’s Greta Gerwig-directed blockbuster Barbie—landed her first acting gigs in first grade. One of them was her big break as Daphne on the Disney Channel series