Jodi Behan was still relatively unknown last Tuesday.
During the day, she cleaned a yoga studio in exchange for free classes. At night she dreamed about becoming an acting sensation. Never in those dreams did she think it would happen like this.
Now she's known to millions as the young bride who gets a terrible hairstyle an hour before her wedding, has a meltdown, and does a hack job on her own hair.
In a time when YouTube is a stage for all the world to strut and fret upon, it took just a few days to make her and three friends overnight celebrities for appearing in a video clip that was staged as part of a marketing scheme for a hair-care brand. Now she's one of four twenty-somethings from Toronto just trying to reap some advantage from the whirlwind of media exposure.
"Before all of this, [an]acting career was unobtainable. And now it's all just in front of me," said Ms. Behan, who was nicknamed "Bridezilla" for her leading role in the six-minute online video, Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out, which has attracted more than 2.5-million viewers since it was posted two weeks ago.
"And I feel that I have to take advantage of all this while the doors are open."
The 22-year-old has managed to keep herself in the spotlight since the video broke upon mainstream media with Meredith Vieira on NBC's The Today Show Wednesday morning.
Things haven't been the same since.
Ms. Behan, her sister Jessie and friends Ingrid Haas and Esther Orosz, all 24, have been swept up in a media frenzy both here and in the U.S.
On Thursday they did segments on CTV's Canada AM and E-Talk Daily. On Friday the four flew to New York City to appear on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer. That was followed by appearances on Fox's The Morning Show and the syndicated Inside Edition. After having lunch with an ABC producer yesterday, they were preparing to move on Los Angeles for a taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live. They say they turned down Jay Leno.
The four aspiring actresses have, until now, had minor unpaid roles in independent films or school plays.
"All I know is that I'm an actor and trying to generate work," said Ms. Haas -- who scripted and filmed the video -- from her Manhattan hotel room on Friday. "Because if there's one thing I learned in theatre school, it's that no one's going to come knocking on your door - you have to do it yourself."
The Bride's rise to becoming among the 100 most-viewed YouTube clips of all time (a newer, slightly shortened version can be found at http://youtube.com/watch?v=MRNntNBEUF0 ) was partly due to the early debate over whether the clip was real or staged.
The real story started in December when a Toronto-area marketing consultant, John Griffith, was having dinner at Hemingways in Yorkville. He got talking to Ingrid Haas, who works there, and the two started tossing around ideas for a campaign he was working on for the Sunsilk line of hair-care products.
He attended a play in which Ms. Haas and Jessie Behan were starring, and he was instantly sold on their acting, said their agent Richard Gerrits. Jodi and Esther were brought in to round out the cast.
Ms. Haas brainstormed the idea of the psychotic bride with her friends, and she and Mr. Griffith wrote the script in a matter of hours over coffee in early January.
Jodi became the lead because she was the only one willing to chop her own hair off, her mother, Susan Behan, says.
They filmed it all in one take at the Four Points By Sheraton on Lakeshore Boulevard in early January and it went up on YouTube shortly after.
None of the girls told their friends about it because of a confidentiality clause they had signed with the company.
The clip was popular, but it really took off on Wednesday, when celebrity gossip blog Dlisted blew Ms. Behan's cover as an actress after receiving a tip from a reader.
In duping millions of viewers with the clip, Ms. Behan established herself as part of an emerging group of bricoleurs, tinkering with the YouTube format in creative ways, said Stephen Muzzatti, a sociology professor at Ryerson University.
That people believed the clip as real "speaks to the creativity of those folks staging the hoaxes," Dr. Muzzatti said.
Other than the format, however, Dr. Muzzatti doesn't see anything new about Ms. Behan's meteoric rise to web notoriety.
"I don't think there's anything particularly new in this quest for celebrity, for the Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame," Dr. Muzzatti said.
"If there is more of this going on, it's connected to the ease with which people are able to harness some of these new communications technologies."
But Ms. Behan said she is going to work hard to make sure it turns out to be more than just a fleeting grasp at stardom. "I don't really care for it all, if it's just going to be 15 minutes of fame."