Aural Fixation: Celebrity Audio Erotica Is 2025’s Answer to the Centerfold

Barely 24 hours after The Summer I Turned Pretty finale aired, Christopher Briney revealed his next project. No, not the hit show’s surprise movie, but his starring role in a three-part audio erotica, “Hidden Harbor,” from the app Quinn. “When River, voiced by Chris Briney, comes home for the summer, he doesn’t pl an on falling for his brother’s ex,” the synopsis reads. Sound familiar?

Briney is the latest actor to embrace the world of soft-core audio porn. While romantasy series like A Court of Thorns and Roses helped legitimize smut, Quinn has been leading the charge on the audio front thanks to its growing star power. The app, founded in 2019 by CEO Caroline Spiegel, has tapped celebrities including Andrew Scott, Tom Blyth, Thomas Doherty, Jesse Williams, and Jamie Campbell Bower to narrate steamy original erotica stories.

While Briney’s character, River, sounds like an extension of his breakout role, the sensitive beach-town heartthrob Conrad Fisher, others have spanned the fantastical. Scott took on the role of Robb the Protector, a tyrannical queen’s chief guard who has a dalliance with a resistance leader, while Doherty’s Horatio, an inventor, is tasked with destroying a time machine and falls for his assistant along the way. It isn’t only aiming to appeal to straight women, eitherâ€"Victoria Pedretti got in on the fun, narrating a sapphic, Killing Eveâ€"esque spy tale.

Outside of sex scenes, Playboy and Playgirl dominated sex and nudity in media. Up until about 10 years ago, celebrities were leaving little to the imagination in print centerfolds. (Indeed, one of Keeping Up With the Kardashians’s richest cultural contributionsâ€"“Kim, you’re doing amazing, sweetie!”â€"was borne out of Kim Kardashian’s Playboy shoot.) Still, there was a sense of taboo around baring it all for the camera. Last week, Glee actor Chord Overstreet revealed that, during the height of the show, he shot a full-frontal spread in Playgirl. But, despite his reported $100,000 payday, Overstreet’s publicist pulled the shoot. There was similar trepidation around audio erotica in the early days of Quinn, which launched its app in 2021. “In the early days, pitching Quinn to talent wasn’t easyâ€"we heard a lot of no,” Spiegel says.