But Denise’s days of romantic strife may be over. In the Prime Video series’ finale, her character couples up with Jeremiah in the months after his wedding to Belly (Lola Tung) is called off. Briggs learned shortly after filming began that her character was destined to end up with the younger Fisher brother. “Jenny sat me down and told me where the arc was going, and I was shocked,” says the actor, who revealed the spoiler to only her mother and boyfriend. Briggs says that cast members received the season’s scripts two at a time—and that all of the Paris-set portions of the final two episodes were blacked out from the versions she received.
Although I am privy to the spoiler before our first conversation, Briggs plays coy about Denise and Jeremiah until our official post-finale Zoom call. There, she shares her theory on when things became romantic between the former coworkers and temporary roommates. “Initially, she did find him attractive, but obviously he was engaged and she didn’t take him seriously,” says Briggs. “So she was rather reserved and slightly antagonistic around him.”
As the first person in her family to go to college, Denise is weary of the familial advantages enjoyed by “nepo baby” Jeremiah and her fellow coworker Steven (Sean Kaufman), Belly’s older brother. “She’s had to work twice as hard to get into any room,” says Briggs, “which is why I think she passes such harsh judgment on Steven and Jeremiah. That’s a fear of hers—these guys waltz in, and in six months, they’re [her] boss…. But once Denise gets to know both Steven and Jeremiah, she releases that resentment because she admits to seeing the good, the talent, the passion in them.”
Witnessing that ambition is also what leads Denise to confess her attraction to Jeremiah in the final episode. “Talent and passion are so attractive, for Denise especially,” says Briggs. “When I was diving into why she chose to go into venture capital, I determined that she was really passionate about early-stage [venture capital] because that’s where you get in on the ground floor and facilitate growth. Now she sees Jeremiah transforming this passion [for cooking] into a viable career path, and she wants to help facilitate.”
In the lead-up to this surprising conclusion, Briggs says, she’s had mainly positive fan interactions. “Knock on wood, haven’t got any weirdos,” she jokes, though she admits that Jeremiah has garnered some backlash for his onscreen actions—prompting the series to issue its impassioned audience stern anti-bullying guidance. “I feel defensive for all the characters,” Briggs says when I ask if she feels protective of Jeremiah. “I just want people to have empathy, but I understand any good art is going to make you have opinions.” Although she didn’t see all of the memes about Jeremiah’s love for a certain dark chocolate mirror glaze cake coming. She saw the cake mentioned in a script, but “I think I just glazed over it,” Briggs says, stopping to chuckle: “I glazed over it.”
Raised an only child by her lawyer father (“He wanted me to be a lawyer. Apologies, dad…. I’ll play a lawyer on TV.”) and stay-at-home mother in Los Angeles, Briggs fell in love with acting as a young child while watching the swashbuckling adventures of Pirates of the Caribbean. “I begged my parents for years to let me do it. And of course they’re not going to take the whims of a three-year-old seriously,” Briggs says. “I was also saying that I wanted to be the president and a veterinarian at the time.”
Her parents finally relented, enrolling Briggs in her first acting class at age six. She began to book commercials and print work the following year, but never made it big. “Growing up in LA and being a child actor, you’re mostly going up for Disney stuff,” Briggs says. “But I would always get the note, ‘She’s just not Disney.’ I always had this knowledge that my career was really going to start later on in life, which I’m so happy about. I feel so much more prepared for it now. I’m also a much better actor now. And I’m happy that I had a normal childhood.” One that included her own teenage trip to Paris (“I probably wore a beret and the French were probably pissed off at me for doing that”) and a Summer I Turned Pretty–esque devotion to Gossip Girl (“I’ve rewatched it 10 times at the very least”).
