Ben Christensen makes cinematic TikToks — but you probably know him by his hard-to-forget social media handle, DangerBean55.

The Canadian filmmaker started making TikToks during the pandemic, after what he thought would be his big break fell through.

“I had a little bit of a break at traditional success. When I graduated university, we had to do a practicum, like a final project. Me and a partner made a pilot for a TV show, like a variety comedy show,” Christensen recently told MovieMaker in a roundtable interview with fellow TikTok filmmakers about how the app is impacting the future of filmmaking.

Adult Swim, the network behind Rick and Morty and Bob’s Burgers, saw their pilot online and expressed interest.

“On the Adult Swim Reddit, weirdly enough, they were like, ‘We love this. We want to make something with you guys.’ And we thought it was fake. So we didn’t even reply to it,” he says.

“Two months later, they email us again. They were like, ‘Hey, we want to do a pilot with you guys. Let’s make this happen. So they sent us like $10,000 U.S., which in Canadian is a little more… so it was a big deal for us. We were 20. We were freaking out.”

Sadly, fate had other plans.

“Pretty much right after we made that, we sent it off to them, and then COVID hit,” he says. “Nothing really came of it.”

But something good still came out of it, Christensen says.

“I realized that social media was probably a good place to bypass all of the distribution and all the production and all of the hoops that come with traditional film and TV. So I just start putting TikToks out when I was going crazy in my room during COVID,” He says.

“It just kind of happened, so it was kind of circumstance. Definitely what’s kept me on there is that there are no barriers? I’m just directly connected to the audience. So any films, any ideas that I have, it can just go right to them. So that’s why I’m still here.”

More About Ben Christensen, AKA DangerBean55

Christensen currently has nearly 800,000 followers on TikTok, where he posts mini cinematic-style short videos that range from funny skits to dramatic, tear-jerking moments that really make you think.

His most viewed video has 25 million views, posing the question, “If you could bring one musician back from the dead to see live, who would it be?”

Other memorable skits include “Lost Stuff”, a hilarious look at the things we lose overtime, including ourselves — and “Missing Socks”, an an Interstellar-style story of two friends who travel to another dimension to find the socks that get lost in the dryer, then discover that only one of them can return.

In keeping with Christensen’s style, it’s full of more than one satisfying twist, and surprisingly emotional dialogue. Leveraging his large and enthusiastic social media following, Christensen recently crowdfunded a $40,000 budget to make his upcoming short film, “Kill Space.”

After spending some time on @DangerBean55’s TikTok page, you’d be forgiven for hallucinating that you were in a movie theater.

Now in his late twenties, Christensen has been using the same screen name since he was in middle school. And if you’re wondering where DangerBean55 came from, ask yourself what your screen name was when you were 12.

“I really am diehard and my handle hasn’t changed,” he says. “Everyone’s like, what is that? And I’m like, I don’t know. I made it in like sixth grade. My bio on YouTube was I will never change my handle. So I’m still DangerBean.”

Main Image: Ben Christensen, photo by Kristine Cofsky