Terry O’Connor Is Charli XCX’s Secret Weapon

If you’ve been deep enough into the Charli XCX universe, you know the name Terry O’Connor. Charli’s bestie and collaborator has been especially visible during her Brat era — but he’s still a man of mystery to many superfans. What exactly is his job title in relation to Charli? “That is the No. 1 question that I get asked on the Internet, and I never answer,” the 30-year-old Boston native tells Elite Daily.

“Some people call me a nepo friend. Some people say I’m her creative director, but I’m not,” he says. “I would say I’m like a marketing director, but with a strong focus on social media.”

The two first met at a friend’s birthday party in Los Angeles in 2020, which O’Connor attended with his boyfriend, Benito Skinner. It was during the pandemic, but O’Connor and Skinner had tested negative for COVID. “Ben and I both had just moved to L.A., and I was so scared that we were never going make any friends,” O’Connor says.

“We went to this party. And then, Charli turned around at the bar,” O’Connor says. At the time, Skinner was starting to develop his TV series Overcompensating, which was greenlit by Prime Video earlier this year. “We’re both such huge fans, but Ben really had his eyes set on her to do the music for his show. He immediately pitched it to her, and she was like, ‘Cool. Yeah. Send me the script.’ From there, we just became friends.” Charli ended up not only producing original music for Overcompensating but also signing on as a guest star.

Along with his work with Charli, O’Connor has made a name for himself online as an expert on all things pop culture. A couple of months ago, he began posting weekly “cultural digests,” informative videos that fill in his 59,000 followers on the most important news of the week — like Dua Lipa’s strange Diet Coke mixture or whether Addison Rae or Tate McRae is channeling Britney Spears more.

Now, O’Connor is ready to lift the mysteries surrounding him.

ED: Aside from Brat, what’s been your favorite pop culture moment of this year?

TO: I really love Moo Deng; she’s captured all of our hearts in a special way. Animal videos were such an early Internet millennial phenomenon, and I’m super excited that they seem to be coming back.

Now all the competing zoos are trying to make their own baby animal happen, which I think is so funny. There’s this hilarious pop-girl stardom thing that we’re applying to these baby animals.

ED: What’s a trend from the year that you think needs to go?

TO: Ethel Cain just made this post about how we’re in an irony epidemic. She was talking about how you can’t put out serious art without someone being like “Mama, a girl behind you” or something. Just all of this Internet lingo dribble that we love saying. I’m conflicted about it because I love that stuff, too. Anytime I see “donatella VERSACE 💜,” I laugh. But I think she’s accurately calling out a lack of seriousness.

We’re at peak brain rot, and we’re going to swing into sincerity pretty soon.

ED: Do you have a pop culture prediction for 2025?

TO: Going off the Ethel thing, I do think we’re going to see a pendulum swing. We’re at peak brain rot, and we’re going to swing into sincerity pretty soon.

Especially during the pandemic, everyone was doing so much — being so intense with posting politics and therapy-speak, and taking things too seriously. Crying on the Internet was such a thing. Then the pendulum swung into a full Internet brain rot; nothing is serious anymore. So I’m hoping maybe it’ll swing a little more to a middle ground.

ED: A lot of your other recent TikToks have been from behind the scenes at the Sweat Tour. How many shows have you been to?

TO: I was really supposed to only go to the big shows for Sweat. But then I was like, “I want to go to opening night.” And then, “OK, wait. But I want to see it again.” And then, “Oh, maybe I should go to Chicago.” And then, “Oh, I’ll go to the L.A. shows.” So yeah, I’ve ended up going to a lot of them.

ED: What’s it been like to hang out with Troye Sivan on the tour?

TO: Troye and I are good friends. We’re sort of like a sexless married couple. We have compatible hanging-out preferences. He’s literally the best.

ED: What’s your favorite memory from the tour?

TO: At every show, there’s this chaotic scramble that happens before we go on stage. It’s exactly what people would expect from this group: Troye is very seriously doing his warm-up with his dancers, and we’re all pouring Aperol spritzes in Charli’s room. She might have a cigarette. We’re all taking chaotic pictures, and Charli’s standing on a table, and I’m under the glass.

Then we’re like, “Does Troye want to do a TikTok?” And he’s like, “Guys, I’m dancing.” And we’re like, “Oh, come on. Do a TikTok with us.” And we’ll do one. Then it’s suddenly like, “Oh, sh*t. Time to go out.” That’s why I end up going to all these shows, because it’s such a fun time.

ED: One of my favorite viral moments was when Benny brought his co-star Kyle McLachlan to a show. What was that day like?

TO: We were on set shooting Ben’s show earlier, and everyone was scrambling to wrap up scenes because we were like, “We have to go to the Sweat Tour!”

I feel like there’s a certain Gen Z TikTok world where Kyle is considered the dad and also his own pop girl. He is Mr. Brat. So it was the perfect combination of Ben’s world, Charli’s world, and the Internet. I was obsessed.

ED: I loved your recent TikTok jokingly confronting Charli about how she keeps saying she’s pivoting from music to acting. Is that something you two argue about?

TO: I’ve been joking that I’m losing all of my friends to cinema. Cinephiles are ruining the world! And she’s one of them. It’s me against arthouse film at the moment, and she is on the side of arthouse film. But I have no doubt that she can be a massive movie star and also a pop star at the same time.

ED: Just as long as she doesn’t totally ignore music.

TO: I know. Trust me. I’m just as invested in this as you.

ED: Charli recently said everyone was against the simple lime green Brat cover when she first pitched it. Did that include you?

TO: Yeah, I was against it too. She was the sole genius behind that. One of the things that was quite successful for Crash, her previous era, was the album artwork that we shot together. It made a splash, and she was breaking through in a new mainstream way. So we were scared that she was risking going back in this other direction that wouldn’t be as commercially successful.

But she’s so convincing. She wrote a whole document outlining what this era would be, and everything on it came true.

ED: She also revealed she was texting with you when she posted the “kamala IS brat” tweet in June, which became such a huge moment for Harris’ campaign. Do you remember that conversation?

TO: We text about everything that goes out, like every tweet. I don’t think either of us expected it to become what it was. People really took it as an immediate, strong endorsement, and that wasn’t necessarily the intention. It’s not that it wasn’t an endorsement; it was just that it got turned into this much larger conversation.

We know when we’re being a little feisty and pushing the boundaries. I’m obsessed with that moment, personally. But it’s scary when the public takes something and runs so far with it. It can feel like you’ve lost control of the narrative. But it worked out. We’re on the right side of history.

ED: Now that the Brat remix album is out, is there an artist you wish could have been featured who wasn’t?

TO: It would've been a fun moment if Chappell Roan was on it, because they’ve had such cool rises at a similar time.

ED: What are your favorite songs from Brat and the remixes?

TO: My favorite song on Brat is “Sympathy Is a Knife.” After she sent me the demo, there was a month where I was listening to it eight times a day, screaming it in my car and in the shower. I could not get enough of it.

And then, the Lorde remake of “Girl, So Confusing.” Ella texted that verse to Charli before we heard it recorded, and we were sitting there with full-body goosebumps just from reading the words. I nearly started crying. I thought it was the most interesting pop culture music moment to happen in years.

ED: The announcement of that collab on the Brat wall was so iconic, too.

TO: That was my favorite wall that we did. I was so gagged when I found out that I could eliminate the letters in the deluxe album title to spell out “Lorde.”

ED: There have been so many jokes about the transition from “I Think About It All the Time” and “365.” How do you feel about how those two songs are situated on the album?

TO: I’m obsessed with it. When she sent the sequence, I was literally like, “You’re such a genius.” It’s brilliant, and it’s exactly what’s so cool about the album. That’s what being at a party is like: One moment, we’re talking about something super serious, and then the next we’re like, “OK. Time to get back to partying.”

ED: We know that Kamala is brat. Is there anyone else you want to declare is brat right now?

TO: This is a f*cking insane answer, but I just saw this “360” edit of Melania Trump. I was dying, and it low-key convinced me maybe she’s also brat.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.