In April 2022, news broke that Kristen Stewart had signed on to director Rose Glass’ second feature, Love Lies Bleeding, with a vague plot about bodybuilding. Stewart wouldn’t be playing the lead but the lover of the bodybuilder; the female bodybuilder role was still being cast. Actor Katy O’Brian, 35, known for roles in Black Lightning, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and The Mandalorian, responded with a tweet, complete with a picture of herself lifting: “I’m free.”
Cut to nearly a year later, O’Brian is sitting across from me at the A24 office in New York—on Valentine’s Day, no less—talking about that tweet and that role. In Love Lies Bleeding, now in theaters, she stars as Jackie, a bodybuilder heading to Las Vegas to compete, who falls hard for Lou (Stewart), a gym manager with a criminal family.
As the Indiana-bred O’Brian learned more about the role, it was hard to not feel like it was kismet. “I was like, who else is going to do this? I didn't know any other actors that were also bodybuilders. I certainly didn't know any that were also queer, that were also from the Midwest. There were all these little things where I can relate to this person so much.” All those similarities allowed O’Brian to go into the audition feeling more than just prepared. “I walked into that audition room with the arrogance of somebody that already booked. If I didn't get it, I just felt like it would be their loss. I just felt like I know who this person is and I'm going to show you who this person is.”
While O’Brian may label it as arrogance, some would simply call it confidence, others star quality. The night before O’Brian was a special guest at an early New York screening of Love Lies Bleeding filled to the brim with queers; when she introduced the film and entered the afterparty, bespectacled and blazered, a current filled the air. She carries the same attitude, anchored by kindness, when we talk. She’s dressed festively for the holiday—white jeans with bright blooming flowers on them paired with a nubby sweater with a big red heart on it, hair flopping charmingly into her face.
Love Lies Bleeding premiered at Sundance only a few weeks earlier to both critical and sapphic buzz. Critics have described it as “violent” and “surreal,” and “ambitious.” Lesbians have already started making memes. The film is about to potentially send O’Brian into another stratosphere, but right now, she’s thinking about the work that it took to make it.
Katie O’Brian as Jackie in Love Lies Bleeding.
Creating Jackie alongside Glass (who directed 2020’s religious horror film Saint Maud) and Stewart felt collaborative but also trusting. “Rose never really questioned. She had a trust that Kristen and I knew our characters very well and we’re embodying them in the way that they should be. And then what Rose would present would be some little notes, make it bigger when she envisioned that or this is going to be a campy silly moment or I want this to be more artistic. She has a very creative, beautiful, strange imagination,” O’Brian says. Jackie is a compelling tumbleweed of complications—she’s both optimistic and ambitious, resourceful and violent, naive and lonely. O’Brian hired acting coach Larry Moss to help her build Jackie’s interior life, which the audience gets in glimpses of her bodybuilding dreams.
What ensues is a career-making performance, one that O’Brian fully realizes so brilliantly that the differences between O’Brian and Jackie blurred, even for Glass. “I loved working with Katy. She’s so focused and driven, so calm in the face of the madness a film set can bring. Her performance was incredibly exciting to watch unfold. She proved herself to be a total chameleon to the point that towards the end of the shoot I’d do a slight double take when we were hanging out outside of set [and remember], ‘oh yes, you’re Katy!,” Glass says via email.
The collaboration with director Rose Glass and co-star Kristen Stewart was very trusting on set, O’Brian says.
Acting opposite Stewart, one of Hollywood’s best actresses and an Oscar nominee, might intimidate even the most seasoned actor. “First of all, I am not going to tell Kristen Stewart how we should be doing this,” O’Brian says with a laugh. But more seriously, they rehearsed a lot during filming, sometimes on weekends, reading scenes alongside Glass. And generally it was an incredibly collaborative set working with Stewart, Ed Harris, and Dave Franco. Above all else, O’Brian wanted Lou and Jackie’s connection, aside from their sizzling toxic relationship, to come across for the audience. “My big thing was I wanted to make sure Kristen felt comfortable. I wanted to make sure that she felt safe enough to be vulnerable with me,”she says. “Basically, if it’s an opportunity to be an open book, I’m going to do it.”
I wanted to make sure that [Kristen Stewart] felt safe enough to be vulnerable with me.”
That’s one of the qualities that makes O’Brian’s performance as Jackie click, especially in the intimate sex scenes she and Stewart share. One such scene, where Stewart’s Lou asks Jackie to show her how she masturbat*s, is incredibly sexy and achingly vulnerable as Lou watches Jackie touch herself. It promises to break certain corners of the internet. O’Brian had never worked with an intimacy coordinator before and was “grateful” to work with Christine McHugh, because it helped to lay out any concerns she had about shooting sex scenes and how to make everyone comfortable. What ends up onscreen is frankly, hot. But shooting in New Mexico was literally hot too. “I’m not even sh*tting you. I got ice cold LaCroixs and put them on my nipples. I don't want swollen nipples, I want cute nipples. It was so not sexy,” she laughs.
Kristen Stewart plays Lou opposite O’Brian’s Jackie.
Throughout the film, we get to see so many different facets of Jackie, including her brutality, which is fueled by a co*cktail of loyalty, frustration, and perhaps steroids. Jackie’s acts of violence were something that drew O’Brian to the character, musing about how everybody has a bit of violence in them but most never let it out.
Of course, Jackie’s violent scenes hinge on O’Brian’s physique—which catches Lou’s lusty gazes. Glass’s camera slowly pans over Jackie’s poses and muscular curvature glazed with a sheen of sweat as her muscles bulge and veins pulse. Bodybuilding wasn’t something new for O’Brian; she got into martial arts as a kid because her dad signed her up after she was getting bullied at school. Practicing martial arts in college led to bodybuilding after a trainer suggested it to her. She was hooked. “I started training and I just immediately saw the changes in strength [and] changes in my physique. It was a new fun thing and a huge confidence builder for me. And then at the same time was like, I want to act,” she says.
I tend to cover up, whereas Jackie is like, look at me.”
O’Brian wasn’t in bodybuilder-type shape when she signed on for Love Lies Bleeding so she worked with a trainer to get her ready, but it wasn’t easy. “I don’t take pictures of myself. I think part of it is growing up as a woman, I felt very uncomfortable being eye-f*cked, essentially. I just wanted people to not look at me. That's where I tend to cover up, whereas Jackie is like, look at me. Every decision that they made from the hair to the revealing costumes—they wanted me to be bigger than everybody else in the small town.” She says that all the steps that led her to putting on Jackie’s tiny bikinis helped her feel more confident in wearing them.
That O’Brian plays a bodybuilder in the film seems like fate. But then again, she’s kinda done it all before she got into acting. Growing up in Indiana, O’Brian and her brother got signed up for everything—ice skating, swimming, tennis—and subsequently got kicked out. She always had the acting bug (she and her brother would read mythology books and then act them out) but she didn’t pursue it until much later. “When I decided to get into the business, androgyny was really hot and [being] ‘ethnically ambiguous’ was really hot. The Walking Dead and Marvel were picking up. So it was action. It just was very convenient timing,” she says. In college, she was one year of physics classes away from a neuroscience degree. She worked in law enforcement for a bit. She thought about getting a PhD in psychology, until she started bodybuilding and that gave her the confidence to finally give acting a go.
Now, she lives in Los Angeles with her wife, Kylie, and their dog and cat. As a queer woman, she’s excited that Love Lies Bleeding treats queerness as just another aspect of these women’s lives. But she laments that it’s still, generally, a rarity. “There’s a lot of lacking of queer romance, people of color, and more masculine presenting members of the community [in film]. I think that that’s an oversight and unfortunately, it’s money and marketing and stupid things that shouldn’t matter in art. I hope that I can help open those bridges for the future, but we can do better.”
O’Brian says of queer representation in film, “I hope that I can help open those bridges for the future, but we can do better.”
Love Lies Bleeding is just the beginning of a big year for O’Brian—she also has a role in Lee Isaac Chung’s highly anticipated Twisters out in July. When I mention it seems like she’s about to have a breakout year, she doesn’t take the bait. “Look, this is such a weird business. I have this movie out and Twisters is done, and I’m like, I may never work again. Last year was supposed to be a breakout year for me. I did Ant-Man and The Mandalorian. They came out back to back and then I didn't book anything for months. I just take it with a grain of salt and hope that I get to do a project like this again.”
After watching her command the Love Lies Bleeding crowd and afterparty, I would beg to differ. Everyone who talked to O’Brian, looks a little dazed from being the center of her attention. But she is genuinely interested in the world around her. She talks to nearly everyone at the afterparty, time to time checking in on Kylie, before diving into another conversation. When presented with a belated birthday cake she insists on offering everyone a slice including the servers behind the bar. She and Kylie are the last to leave after being wrapped up in conversation. The same goes with our interview, which runs over time before a publicist pops in to take her and Kylie to their next stop. While it might have taken a while for O’Brian to get here, a well-placed tweet cemented that she’ll certainly be the last to leave.
Kerensa Cadenas
Kerensa Cadenas is a freelance writer and editor based in New York. She's previously worked at Thrillist, The Cut, Entertainment Weekly, and Complex. Her writing has been in GQ, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Cosmopolitan, and others.
