Cooper Tomlinson: the Obsession sidekick who co-built Curry Barker’s machine

Cooper Tomlinson

Photo: Kevin Payravi / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 11, 1999 Woodinville, Washington, United States
Occupation	Actor and screenwriter
Known for	Obsession, Mank

The most talked-about supporting character in Obsession is a guy who wishes for a billion dollars. Ian, the friend who coaches Bear to call his crush “Freaky Nikki” and then quietly circles her himself, is the kind of part that usually goes to whoever the casting office finds that week. In Curry Barker’s film it went to the one person who had been there before the film existed. Cooper Tomlinson co-founded the sketch channel where Barker learned his craft, acted in and shot the micro-budget feature that got the pair noticed, played Bear in the screen test and pushed for the ending audiences still argue about. Then he took the third chair on screen. What his career is asking now is what happens when the partner moves to the front.

Tomlinson grew up in Woodinville, a suburb northeast of Seattle, and started making short films in high school, writing and producing them as well as acting. The habit carried into his first feature credit: in Aberdeen, a small independent drama, he played Connor and also served as associate producer. By the time it came out he had moved to Los Angeles, and on his first day at the New York Film Academy’s campus there he met Barker while standing in line. They bonded, according to The Hollywood Reporter, over The Walking Dead and Weezer.

That was 2018, and Tomlinson, born on January 11, 1999, was nineteen; Aberdeen reached audiences the following year. Neither of them lasted long in the acting program. They had started posting videos together and found that YouTube taught them faster than the classroom did; they described it as their film school outside of film school. They dropped out, moved in together and built that’s a bad idea, a comedy channel where the two of them wrote, shot, edited and performed almost everything. “From when we’d wake up to when we’d go to bed, we were always creating,” Tomlinson said.

The ambitions soon outgrew the sketch format. In 2022, the channel’s busiest stretch, they were writing, shooting and editing three sketches a week while making a feature on weekends with friends filling out the cast. “We didn’t have a cameraman or any money,” he recalled. That feature became Milk & Serial, a found-footage horror film about two YouTube pranksters whose rivalry turns lethal. Barker directed and played Milk; Tomlinson played Steven, known as Seven, the friend being set up for murder, and also worked as co-producer and cinematographer. The budget was $800, spent mostly on a camcorder and on paying actors. No distributor bit, so they put it on YouTube for free in August 2024, and critics at Variety and The Guardian wrote about it within weeks.

Obsession began on a summer evening in 2023. Tomlinson had come over to watch Barker’s guest spot on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and a Simpsons Halloween episode airing just before it sent Barker toward a be-careful-what-you-wish-for premise. Tomlinson heard the pitch the next morning. When the project took shape, he stood in as Bear, the shy music-store clerk who wishes his coworker Nikki would love him, for test footage of the wish scene shot at a friend’s house. The role went to Michael Johnston, and Tomlinson has said he knew at once it was the right call. “It was really always Ian for me,” he said. He also took an associate producer credit, and when Barker’s father and others argued against the scripted ending, he backed the version now on screen, which leaves Nikki awake amid the wreckage. “If it went the other way, the story is closed,” he said. “There’s nothing else to say.”

The film cost $750,000. It premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025, set off a bidding war that Focus Features won with a deal reported at around $15 million, and opened wide in May 2026. Box Office Mojo puts its worldwide total at $519 million, $263 million of it in North America, the biggest result in Focus’s history. For Tomlinson the clearest sign of the change came sideways, when an old headshot of his started circulating as a meme. People always ask when you know you’ve made it, he told The Hollywood Reporter: “It’s when you’ve become a meme.”

There is a lazy version of this story in which Tomlinson is the lucky roommate, carried into a hit by a director whose name now opens films. It gets the division of labor wrong. The groundwork behind Obsession was shared: the channel, the $800 feature, the screen test, the table read with friends before anyone had money behind the script. The authorship was not. Barker wrote, directed and edited the film,. Tomlinson’s on-screen contribution is a supporting turn as a jealous, controlling friend he calls “the devil on the shoulder,” and the diner scene that gives Ian his sharpest moments was a reshoot of what had been a phone call. Nothing in that record yet shows what he can carry on his own as a lead or as a writer, and the hit, for all its size, did not answer that.

While Obsession waited for its release, he took outside work. He read an article about Dutton Ranch, the Yellowstone sequel series for Paramount+, received an audition an hour later and sent the tape within the hour. Three weeks later he had the part, a sheriff’s deputy, and shot his scenes in full police gear during a Fort Worth summer, in 105-degree heat, opposite Kelly Reilly‘s Beth Dutton. The series premiered on May 15, 2026, the same day Obsession reached theaters across the United States.

The real test is already in the can. Anything but Ghosts, which Tomlinson co-wrote with Barker and executive produced, casts the two of them as Eddy and Mouse, fake paranormal investigators who run into a real entity. Bryce Dallas Howard, Aaron Paul and Violet McGraw join them. Filming ran in Vancouver from March to April 2026 under the working title Faraday, before Obsession opened, on what Tomlinson called “a completely different playing field” in budget terms. Blumhouse-Atomic Monster produces, Focus Features distributes, and the story sits in the same universe as Obsession. On a podcast he described it as “like if Key and Peele walked into Hereditary.” Paul closes a loop: in 2019 the two friends bumped into him at a screening of El Camino.

Tomlinson says the plan is to resist the scale that success invites. “That’s why we like to stay scrappy, keep running and gunning, and stay grounded about things,” he told Deadline. Anything but Ghosts opens in theaters on May 7, 2027, and it will be the first time a cinema audience sees Cooper Tomlinson at the top of the bill beside Barker rather than one name down.

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