“Oh my god! You're the girl from 'The Polar Express,'” a tourist yelled at Nia Wilkerson.
Dressed in a pink nightgown, Wilkerson danced in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan for a TikTok video.
Over the course of the next two hours Monday afternoon, dozens more people stopped and stared. Many of them filmed her from afar or asked to take selfies with her.
“Wait, are you In fact The girl from the movie? asked a passerby.
The answer to that question is no. Ms. Wilkerson, a senior at St. John's University in Queens, was 3 years old in 2004, when “The Polar Express” was released.
The film, a blockbuster directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg, has long attracted criticism due to its motion capture animation style, which gives its characters a haunting, zombified appearance.
Wilkerson, 22, said that ever since she was an elementary school student in Woodbridge, Virginia, people told her she looks like Hero Girl, a character in the movie who is also known as Holly. Later, a high school crush pointed out the resemblance.
“That was heartbreaking,” he joked.
Since then, Wilkerson, who is five feet tall, has come to embrace his digital double. This is the fourth holiday season she has spent making TikTok videos dressed as Hero Girl. Every year its popularity has grown. She now she has almost a 250,000 followers.
Wilkerson said she came up with the idea after seeing another woman on TikTok dressing up as the character. “But she didn't really look like her,” he said.
In “The Polar Express,” Holly wears pigtails and a pink patterned nightgown. Ms. Wilkerson opts for a variation of the look from her TikToks.
“It's a seasonal concert,” she said, adding that she was recently mobbed by people dressed as Elmo while filming a video in Times Square.
She was joined Monday by several of her St. John's classmates, who acted as her unpaid film crew. “My friendship is my payment,” Wilkerson joked, adding that she had bought food for the group at the campus cafeteria during the weeks of filming.
She used to suffer from social anxiety, she said, but her TikTok alter ego has helped her overcome it. “No one in New York cares,” she said. “She would never do this anywhere else.”
Wilkerson, who studies television and film at St. John's, has found ways to capitalize on his 15 minutes of seasonal fame. She participates in TikTok's creator fund, a program the company uses to pay certain people who make videos for the platform, she said. Musicians have contacted her to make videos, she added. Her fee is about $250 per video, she said. Outside of the holiday season, she makes videos on other topics, but her views decline sharply.
While most of the comments have been positive, Ms Wilkerson said she no longer read responses to her videos, having seen too many racist comments. Still, her social media fame has had its perks, like a recent collaboration with @jerseyyjoe, a popular TikTok creator known for his dance moves who sometimes makes videos dressed as Hero Boy from “The Polar Express.”
After an afternoon of filming, Ms. Wilkerson and her friends talked about their upcoming final exams while waiting for an F train on a subway station platform. Ms. Wilkerson mentioned a previous subway video, in which she accidentally kicked a passenger.
After boarding a rush-hour train car, they stood in formation to film another TikTok. One of Wilkerson’s friends, Amanda Gopie, 20, pointed to a sign that said: “Don't be anyone's subway story. Courtesy counts.”
“That's you,” Ms. Gopie said, eliciting laughter from the other members of the group.
As the F train moved toward Queens, Wilkerson and his friends recorded themselves singing “When Christmas Comes to Town,” a song from “The Polar Express.”
“The best time of the year, when everyone comes home,” Ms. Wilkerson began.
As their friends joined in to form a trembling chorus, some riders raised their heads in recognition. One told the singers to work on their tone. The group decided to try another shot.
