“I’m very much a ‘yes’ person,” says Chiara King. The British content creator needed very little convincing when she received an email from director Mike Nybroe a few years ago asking if she’d be interested in portraying a fictionalized version of herself in a thriller about the dark side of the influencer world. Little did King know just how much the plot of the film would come to mirror her own life.
“The Influencer Project” is produced by the “Blair Witch Project” team and is a documentary-style psychological thriller that follows a fictionalized Chiara King as she is flown to Copenhagen to spend a week in the city, while a film crew follows her to document life as an influencer. Soon enough, she starts receiving disturbing and threatening messages from a stalker, who uses the information King shares online about her life to harass her.
In the midst of shooting, King herself got a stalker. Suddenly the project became much more personal.
“You never think it happens to you. And then it happened, and then I had to go back in and reshoot scenes after the situation had happened to me,” King says of the experience. “So it was very fresh. I had a life coach with me to help me not allow it to consume me. We had different methods on how to make that work. It was almost like life imitating art, which was really creepy and scary.”
King, 27, got started on social media during COVID-19, documenting her experience through a breakup.
“It just went from there, and then millions and millions of girls related to my problems, and that’s how it all started,” she says. She now has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and another 4.3 million on TikTok, and her content is generally positive and humorous.
But she was intrigued by Nybroe’s concept of showing the harder sides of influencing.
“A lot of what you see online is very performative and it’s a story. The influencer tells a story, but what really happens behind the scenes and what people don’t see is the hate and the bad comments,” King says. “People won’t really even realize that an influencer’s getting hate. But I was getting a lot of hate comments and you just have to suck it up and you’re not allowed to complain because you should be grateful.”
“You’re constantly on, constantly posting. If you take a day off, there’s a fear of becoming irrelevant,” she adds. “It’s a lot of pressure. I have gray hairs. I’m not joking. I’m 27, I have gray hairs.”
And then there was her experience with the stalker, which has dramatically changed how she shares her life online.
“I’ve never valued my privacy more in my life,” she says. “I used to post so blatantly and with so much naivety online thinking that everyone has your best interest, when in reality, you are putting yourself out there to millions and millions and millions of people, even if you’re just a normal girl with no followers, and it really just takes one person. That’s all it takes,” she says. “Now I don’t post my location live, and I’ll only post after I’ve left a hotel if it’s in a collaboration with a hotel or with a brand, just because it’s not worth it.”
She hopes that people come away from the movie with more of an awareness of their own online safety.
“I hope people take away the fact that we can be so naive online and so naive to being exposed online and so naive to how many people are actually watching your videos and your stories,” she says. “It really is that easy to track where people are. And if people can take away one thing is to stop sharing your live location. We’re so quick to post, ‘Oh, I’m at this restaurant,’ or, ‘I’m at this event.’ Do you know how easy it is for people to get tracked?”
With the film now under her belt, she’s hoping to continue in the acting space, with a role even further removed from herself next time.
“It would be amazing to open up this world of acting and to be able to explore different roles, not just in horror, but in drama, in romance, in rom-coms. It would be really cool to do a rom-com because my content on social media has always been very comedic,” she says. “To do horror and to portray Chiara King, the fictional character, as taking her power back and facing the villain, facing the stalker instead of shying away, which is what I would usually do personally, it was such an amazing experience.”