By Esther Zuckerman
GQ
March 1, 2024

When Katy O’Brian first heard about Love Lies Bleeding, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t already gotten an audition for it. A fan sent her a casting notice seeking a queer female bodybuilder for a lesbian psychothriller over Twitter. And since O’Brian is a queer female performer with previous bodybuilding experience, she knew she had to be considered.

“I’m like, I should have seen this,” she remembers. “So I made a PowerPoint and I sent it to my team. I was like, ‘Get me this audition or I’ll lose my mind.'”

O’Brian got that first audition, and—after many callbacks—booked the role of Jackie, a 1980s drifter on the way to Vegas for a bodybuilding competition who starts an affair with gym employee Lou, played by Kristen Stewart. Their extremely hot romance, fueled by desire and steroids, eventually turns violent when Lou’s viciously chaotic family gets involved, including her abusive brother-in-law (Dave Franco) and her gun-runner dad (Ed Harris.)

As Jackie, O’Brian is alternately a literal embodiment of female strength—the A24 film from director Rose Glass takes some fantastical turns having to do with Jackie’s bulging muscles—and someone who needs to be saved by Lou, who is physically smaller but has a dark past that makes her equipped to handle crisis. It’s also a huge leap forward for O’Brian. Up until Love Lies Bleeding, which premiered at Sundance to critical acclaim, she’d mostly been cast in small parts in big genre fare like The Mandalorian and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

O’Brian had moved to Los Angeles hoping to do projects in that blockbuster realm, but she also wanted something more. “I love superheroes,” she says. “But I also wanted to present these tangible characters, even in extraordinary circumstances, who you can really relate to.”

There’s something a little bit extraordinary about O’Brian’s own journey to the screen, which she recounts to me in A24’s New York offices on Valentine’s Day morning. It’s frigid, but O’Brian is dressed in colorful jeans that she thrifted for this quick trip to promote the movie at a “Galentine’s” screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. (The event was semi-ironic; Love Lies Bleeding is far bloodier than the cutesy Galentine’s Day outing as canonized by Parks and Recreation.)

That Monday O’Brian turned 35 and celebrated with her wife, who came along for the trip. They were planning to hit up Sleep No More before heading back to LA. After we shared photos of our dogs—O’Brian has a two-year-old named Hei Hei from a litter she fostered—I asked the actress to break down how she went from working as a cop in Indiana to indie movie breakout.

O’Brian grew up in Indianapolis. She’d always wanted to act, but never expected it would be a viable career path. She enrolled in Indiana University with the idea that she’d do something in the world of psychology; she also joined the campus police force’s Cadet Officer Program, and worked security at games and school events in exchange for free room and board. The gig allowed her to meet the Dalai Lama and escort the princess of Thailand around campus; it also required her to enroll in the actual police academy within a year. “I didn’t quite register that was real,” she says. “As a kid, I was never like, ‘I’m going to be a cop.'”

After college, she worked in local law enforcement, but found the work “draining” and “sad.” So she wrote a list of what she really wanted out of life, which led her to acting classes, and to a local gym where a coach suggested she consider bodybuilding. “I always wanted to just feel really powerful,” she says, “in an actual physical sense.”

O’Brian only competed in bodybuilding twice, but she liked the way the process made her feel. “It made me feel confident, but I also was getting really strong,” she says. “I know a lot of people are like ‘Oh, bodybuilders aren’t training for strength,’ and I technically wasn’t—but I could still deadlift almost 400 pounds.” She considers bodybuilding an “art,” but eventually decided not to pursue it further. It’s expensive, she explains—those tiny bathing suits cost like $500, and she wasn’t willing to go on a drug cycle, which most people do, she said, “unless you’re like a genetic freak.”

For Love Lies Bleeding, O’Brian worked with celebrity trainer Steve Zim. Because the film is set in the ’80s, she didn’t have to get as small as she would for a modern bodybuilding competition, but she built out her back and made her lats bigger while her torso got smaller. She started training about two weeks before filming in New Mexico and then continued throughout production, which lasted about two months; Glass shot mostly chronologically, so Jackie’s biceps could get more defined as O’Brian’s did.

For what it’s worth: According to O’Brian, Love Lies Bleeding is not entirely accurate when it comes to the world of bodybuilding. Most women wouldn’t be shooting the steroids that Jackie takes; there are slightly more “women-friendly” varieties available. Plus, she adds, “I was talking to one of my buddies the other day, who does use [them], and he’s like, ‘You wouldn’t put it in your toes. It’s not heroin.'” But suspension of disbelief is okay when a film goes to the places Love Lies Bleeding does.