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Analysis
“TikTok isn’t going to make me famous, so it doesn’t really matter,” Romy Croquet, the 16-year-old daughter of director Sofia Coppola and Phoenix’s lead singer Thomas Mars (real last name: Croquet) said in a recent TikTok.
Those seem like the magic words to say to accidentally go viral on the app.
Romy’s TikTok of her making a vodka sauce pasta while grounded at home because she apparently tried to “charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland on my dad’s credit card because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend” took off earlier this week after it was posted to Twitter by user @savbrads.
The video has been viewed more than 11 million times from that one tweet, and several other people also reposted it. By Tuesday afternoon, hours after the TikTok spread to Twitter, Romy had already deleted the video on TikTok.
Her nondescript account was still up, and she had a few other videos public. But none of them had the narrative arc of the vodka sauce pasta video. Her entire TikTok account now appears to be deleted.
Even though it was quickly deleted on TikTok, the internet has spent the week analyzing the teen’s viral video. The granddaughter of the Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and daughter of Marie Antoinette director Sofia Coppola seems to have picked up a few things about storytelling from her famous family. And several people have pointed out that Romy feels like a character in one of Sofia Coppola’s films.
“I’m not joking when I say this, Sofia Coppola’s daughter made a TikTok that is better than every single one of Sofia Coppola’s films minus The Bling Ring and one Strokes music video,” wrote user JMCAggregate.
There’s a lot to say about why Romy’s TikTok resonated with people—including the fact that there’s a lot of interest in nepo babies right now—but the funny part is how she didn’t intend for a wide audience to see her video. As she claims in the TikTok, her parents don’t want her to have any public social accounts. She didn’t use her real name in the username of her account, and she’s not trying to be a social media influencer. She’s just a teenager who wanted to make a silly video about being grounded. When it spread to other parts of the internet, she deleted it.
Romy isn’t the only person who accidentally went viral on TikTok this week. A mom who posted a multi-part story that received millions of views about her husband possibly cheating on her during a trip to Las Vegas had to tell her followers to back off after they found her husband on social media and called his employer. Her account is now set to private.
Why it matters
On TikTok, if you’re not famous or don’t have a recognizable account, it’s easy to think that no one will really care about your video. And once a TikTok goes viral, it’s hard to contain it—even if you delete it. That’s because people regularly download TikToks and upload them on other social platforms like Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter.
Often, when a person goes viral for a TikTok video they made, they’re faced with a lot of hate. Romy Croquet’s video, however, received an overwhelmingly positive response. Her parents might not want her to become a stereotypical nepo baby, but it looks like she’ll find fame on her own.