Tinsel Magazine Profiles Sarah Soda, the Creator Behind TikTok's 1.3 Million-Follower Prank Call Act
Sue Dillon, the fictional 69-year-old Southern firecracker created and performed by Sarah Soda (@sarahsoda5).
Sarah Soda on the red carpet at TikTok LiveFest 2025
An Exclusive reveals how a doctorate-holding clinician and self-taught voice actress built one of TikTok's most demanding live acts — with no agent or manager
LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, March 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Tinsel Magazine, the Los Angeles-based digital culture publication, has published an exclusive long-form profile of Sarah Soda, the Tennessee-based creator and character actress who has amassed 1.3 million followers and over 26 million likes on TikTok performing entirely improvised prank phone calls as a fictional 69-year-old Southern woman named Sue Dillon. The Tinsel Exclusive — the first in-depth editorial feature on Soda — examines her creative process, her clinical background in psychiatric nursing, and the live performance discipline she has developed over years of nightly broadcasts, all while working without an agent, a manager, or any form of industry representation.
The profile opens with the disorienting experience of being on the receiving end of one of Soda's calls: a phone ringing on a Friday night, a gravel-voiced Southern woman who sounds like she's been smoking since the Carter administration, furious about something involving your brother, filling in details about your life that you can't quite place but can't quite deny. By the time you call her back, she already knows your name. None of it is real. And upwards of 5,000 people are watching the whole thing unfold live on TikTok.
What the feature reveals is the distance between what Soda's audience sees and what actually makes the act work. Soda holds a Doctor of Nursing Practice in psychiatric-mental health nursing — a detail that reframes the entire performance. Before she was reading strangers on prank calls, she was reading patients in clinical settings, assessing emotional states, picking up on verbal cues, understanding what someone means underneath what they're actually saying. The profile describes that clinical training as "the invisible architecture underneath every call she makes. She knows when to push. She knows when to pull back. And when a call goes sideways — when she accidentally references something painful, when a joke lands in the wrong place — she knows how to read the silence on the other end of the line and respond like a human being, not a performer protecting a bit."
Four nights a week, Thursday through Sunday, Soda transforms into Sue Dillon and performs live for audiences that regularly number in the thousands. Each call is built from a short prompt submitted by a viewer — a few details about the person being called, maybe a scenario suggestion — and from those fragments she constructs "entire fictional universes in real time. Backstories, relationships, grievances, histories, all invented in the seconds between reading a note card and dialing a number." The demand has grown to the point where fans can now book private prank calls through suedillon.com, turning a live streaming act into its own cottage industry.
The voice is entirely self-taught, a vocal transformation Soda has been refining since childhood, one that used to drive her mother crazy and now sustains a performance schedule of roughly fifteen hours a week of live character voice work. But the profile is candid about the physical toll. The acid reflux, the sore throat, the hoarseness — what the article calls "occupational hazards that don't show up in the highlight reel, but they're the kind of details that separate someone who does a funny voice from someone who works in one." When asked how she pulls it off, Soda told the publication with disarming honesty: "I have a really big imagination and I am actually a great liar. I think these two skills come in handy together."
The piece positions Soda's act as something that falls through the cracks of how the entertainment industry categorizes talent, arguing that what she does "combines the vocal dexterity of a character actor, the improvisational instincts of a UCB-trained comedian, and the emotional intelligence of a clinician — all performed live, unrehearsed, for an audience that would fill a mid-size theater." At a time when networks are rebooting intellectual property from 2004 and calling it innovation, the feature notes, one of the most technically demanding live character performers in the country is building her audience four nights a week from a spare room in Tennessee with no one in Hollywood paying attention.
When asked whether the entertainment industry understands what performers like her are doing on TikTok Live, Soda was direct: "In general, no. Live streaming is exceptionally not understood out of all of social media. It is a new art form, and the majority of the people live streaming are not doing it in a professional way, so it is hard to understand the seriousness of the art there. I do not think the value is seen yet."
One of the more revealing sections of the profile addresses the ethical dimension of prank calling as a performance medium. Soda is described as unusually honest about the tension inherent in the format — deceiving someone for an audience's entertainment when the person on the other end didn't consent to being part of a show. She told the publication she actively turns down call requests designed to hurt people and can identify the ones "where someone wants Sue to be the weapon they're too polite to fire themselves." The feature quotes her: "I refuse to do a call if its only intent is to drag someone down. That isn't fun for me."
The profile also captures moments where the comedy format produced outcomes nobody anticipated. One prank call ended up reconnecting two estranged sisters who hadn't spoken in years — a call that started as a Sue Dillon routine and turned into something else entirely when the conversation shifted and the sisters ended up on a three-way call, talking again for the first time. Soda also described staying on the phone with elderly callers who don't fully understand the prank and simply want to talk. "Sometimes people just need a friend," she told the publication. "And even though it is acting, I genuinely want to be that friend for them."
Her ambitions extend well beyond TikTok. Soda described a dream project — an in-person prank show in the vein of Impractical Jokers but with her own approach: going on dates in character, saying unhinged things, and seeing how long it takes the person across the table to realize none of it is real. She wants to take the thing she does on the phone and bring it into a room, with a camera, and let Sue Dillon loose on the physical world. When asked what she wishes interviewers would ask her — the question nobody thinks to ask — Soda chose: why does she feel the need to create content at all? "It gives me a sense of purpose that I have never felt before," the profile quotes her, "largely because it exercises my creativity beyond what anything else has ever been able to. It also feels like I finally found something that I am good at."
The profile closes with the observation that "every night, thousands of people willingly answer the phone and let a fictional woman rearrange their reality for ten minutes. That isn't content. It's control. And very few performers have it."
The full Tinsel Exclusive is available now at Tinsel Magazine: https://tinselmag.com/sue-dillon-sarah-soda-tiktok-prank-call-profile/
Sarah Soda performs as Sue Dillon on TikTok (@sarahsoda5) Thursday through Sunday: https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahsoda5
Private prank calls can be booked at https://suedillon.com/.
ABOUT TINSEL MAGAZINE
Tinsel Magazine is a digital culture publication covering entertainment, style, internet culture, and the people shaping contemporary life. Based in Los Angeles, Tinsel publishes daily editorial content with a focus on the creative figures, cultural movements, and industry shifts that define modern media. The magazine's Tinsel Exclusive series profiles creators, artists, and cultural figures whose work is redefining their respective fields. For more information, visit https://tinselmag.com/.
Daniel de Castellane
de Castellane Creative
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