How Katy O'Brian Got Shredded for 'Love Lies Bleeding'
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IN MARCH OF 2022, Katy O’Brian stumbled upon an A24 online casting call and perked up. “Seeking an actress with bodybuilding experience,” the listing read, specifying a few other desired characteristics: “fresh-faced, striking, and wide-eyed.” Still relatively new to Los Angeles, where she moved to pursue a full-time acting career, O’Brian had spent her 20s navigating Indiana’s bodybuilding circuit. The muscular role, playing opposite Kristen Stewart, seemed like a perfect fit. It also made her a little annoyed that it hadn’t yet been on her radar. ‘Why did I not get an audition for this?’” she remembers thinking, recounting to Men’s Health inside the library of A24’s New York headquarters.
Later that week, O’Brian put together a PowerPoint selling her extensive, bulked-up background. She compiled old competition photos, chronicled the contests she’d entered, and shared her experiences training. “I told my team to submit that or I would riot, which basically means pout really hard and mope around,” O’Brian laughs. When she eventually got to see pages of the script, she found even more real-life connections. “ ‘This is how I talk,’” she remembers thinking as she read through. “I know this character.” She earned a callback, then a screen test, and then a chemistry read, a six-part audition process that relied on her acting chops and banked on her eventual ability to get ripped. “It was so unlike anything I'd ever done,” O’Brian says. “It scared the shit out of me.”
That’s also how it feels to watch certain parts of Love Lies Bleeding, director Rose Glass’s genre-bending second feature, which starts as a seductive queer romance before turning into a brutal, pulpy thrill ride. Set in 1980s New Mexico, it hinges on Lou (Stewart), a reclusive gym owner, who strikes up a relationship with Jackie (O’Brian), a Midwest drifter on her way to Las Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding contest. As they grow closer, Jackie’s loyal instincts—exacerbated by frequent steroid injections—initiate a supernatural act of violence, uncovering Lou’s criminal family and its secret history. The movie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to glowing reviews, pushed O’Brian to her limit.
“I wanted to challenge myself,” she says of her first leading role. “I just wanted to show that I could do it, and I wanted to show myself that I could do it, too.”
Living up to the casting call’s “striking” descriptor, O’Brian showcases a dynamic screen presence, her soft and sensitive eyes belying her sculpted anatomy and Jackie’s manic descent. It’s a stark departure from O’Brian’s recent—and most notable—stints, playing the stoic and sinister communications officer Elia Kane in The Mandalorian and Jentorra in last year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a marginal role that displayed her martial arts background. The decision to take on a meatier role, she says, afforded a real opportunity to explore her range and performative capabilities. As she witnessed in Park City during Sundance, it also gave her the first taste of stardom. “You're walking on the street to get to and from press things, and you get paparazzi like crazy,” she says. “It was insane. It's like a blur.”
In some ways, O’Brian had been preparing to play Jackie her whole life. At the age of 5, she took martial arts classes to defend herself against elementary school bullies. Though she took various acting classes through high school and college, she pursued law enforcement and became a police officer outside of Indianapolis. “I pushed it off as unrealistic,” she says of acting. Still, she was unhappy. “I just really wanted to get in shape and be confident about my body,” she says. That eventually led her to try bodybuilding, whose various categories didn’t mean just getting abnormally buff. She began training, competed in a couple contests, and split time earning a certificate to train others. The transformation made her stand out.
“There is definitely this thing where people stare at you, they treat you kind of funny; and then, also being queer in the Midwest is not the greatest experience,” she says. “At the end of the day, I got stronger. I showed that I could do it. I have so much respect for it.”
After re-enrolling in acting classes around 2015, O’Brian knew she needed to chase her long-gestating ambition full-time. A year later, she quit her job, dropped her training, and moved to Los Angeles, where she eventually earned a few television roles and met her wife, screenwriter Kylie Chi. Those life-changing experiences came full circle as she began to embody Jackie, another queer, ostracized, and bullied bodybuilder traveling across the country. “There were so many little similarities where I was just like, I have to do this,” she says. “We both moved out west to chase our dreams, we both found love along the way. It just felt like a part that was written for me.”
To get into shape, she enrolled in a taxing regimen two weeks before production began, working out six days a week in three-hour spurts (often after long days of shooting) with Hollywood trainer Steve Zim, whose clients have included Jessica Biel and Ashley Judd. “He knows how to essentially sculpt muscle for the camera, which is a very different experience than just sculpting it for a competition,” O’Brian says. She adds: “He would customize my workouts every single day,” adjusting her routines based on her soreness levels. The studio also supplied O’Brian with a meal prep service and a nutritionist to weigh her breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, tasks she was glad she didn’t have to do herself. “It was as easy as it possibly could be,” she says.
Because Glass filmed the movie chronologically, O’Brian had about a two-month head start to prepare for Jackie’s feverish (and ultimately violent) third-act bodybuilding competition scene. A week before filming, O'Brian worked to shed water weight so she'd look slightly more vascular and show more separation in her muscles (a look she'd based, along with her frizzled hairstyle, on ’80s bodybuilder Lisa Lyon). To do this, she did what's called a dehydration cycle, significantly cutting her water consumption over several days to help get rid of an extra 10 pounds of water weight, a (not quite healthy) process she often implemented before contests in Indiana. “There's a science to having your skin as tight to the muscle as it can be, so you can see striations and the musculature,” O’Brian says, “but at the same time having blood flow and and having a pump.”
The biggest challenge? Flexing and posing—along with real bodybuilders—for extended periods of time. “On an actual contest day, you go out and do like five minutes on stage,” she says. “[But] this is a 12-hour day of me doing the same routine over and over. Your body is so sensitive, it changes dramatically in the course of a couple hours, whether you drink a sip of water or your muscles get tired.”
In between training, O’Brian was grateful for the chance to tap into her character’s sexuality and vulnerable side, too, which, in one scene, meant Stewart intimately licking her feet. “I was like, ‘I can spray mint on my toe,’” she laughs. “I'm ticklish, so it was all I could do not to scream.” It’s a dimension she hadn’t explored much under the Disney and Marvel apparatus, whose controlled environments and lengthy shoots had specific parameters and encouraged varied line readings that didn’t always feel authentic to her character in the final edit. “You really want to make everybody as three-dimensional as possible,” O’Brian says. “They kind of pick the performance, and it takes a little bit of ownership away from you, as the artist.”
Which is maybe why Love Lies Bleeding feels like such a coming-out party—and a chance to expand and diversify her fan base beyond its already strong sci-fi contingent. She’ll have another opportunity this summer thanks to a small role in Twisters, marking a Mandalorian reunion with director Lee Isaac Chung. She’s eager for people to see it (she shows me a photo from the set at the end of our interview), but has tempered her excitement about a career that seems on the precipice of taking off. “I haven’t booked anything since Twisters,” she says.
In other words, she’s in a waiting period, at least until the industry sees her flex. “I have this work, I put it out there, and I'm happy,” O’Brian says. “I feel like now I'm chasing that high of finding another project I love just as much.”
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