In Love Lies Bleeding, the violent, ’80s-era amour fou that instantly and reductively came to be known as the “Kristen Stewart lesbian-bodybuilder movie†after its Sundance Film Festival premiere, Katy O’Brian plays the romantic foil: the bodybuilder. Not just any bodybuilder. Sleeping rough beneath a freeway overpass at the movie’s outset, O’Brian’s character Jackie is a stoic, front-double-biceps-posing street survivor who’s crawled out of some unspecified personal wreckage in Oklahoma en route to a musclewoman competition in Las Vegas. She falls hard and fast for Stewart’s chain-smoking, steroid-slanging “grade-A dyke†gym manager Lou, whose pillow talk includes indelible entreaties like, “I want to stretch you out, see how far you can go†and “Do you put your fingers inside when you fuck yourself? How do you do it? Do you wanna show me?†When elements of Lou’s dark family past reemerge, however, the two must survive by their wits — albeit with Jackie now in a semi-perpetual ’roid-fueled rage. Amid the torpor of their burgeoning love, the corpses start to stack up.
Up until the A24-distributed, Rose Glass–directed Love Lies Bleeding, the Indiana-born O’Brian was best known as one of few actors to have bridged the Star Wars–Marvel Cinematic Universe divide. The actress, 35, appears in a supporting part in last year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania but is most widely recognized for her recurring role as the villainous, Baby Yoda–hunting Elia Kane on Disney+’s The Mandalorian.
But before arriving in Hollywood — and making a splash in what is already the year’s sexiest and most sex-positive indie — O’Brian accrued a different kind of life experience. An accomplished martial artist (with backgrounds in karate, hapkido, Muay Thai kickboxing, and Brazilian jujitsu) and real-life amateur bodybuilder, she spent seven years employed by the Carmel Police Department in Indiana, where she served on the department’s Crisis Intervention Team.
Soon to be seen in a still under-wraps role in July’s megabudget popcorn thriller Twisters, O’Brian opened up to Vulture about bonding with Stewart, the vagaries of working with an intimacy coordinator, and becoming one of pop culture’s highest-profile non-gender-conforming performers.
This is your biggest movie role to date, right?
Yeah. And I don’t have a degree in acting. I’m not fresh out of Juilliard, and this is so different than anything else I’ve done. I think it took a lot of trust for them to bring me on.
What was the auditioning process like?
It was a lot. It was a crazy amount. Someone sent me the casting call, just a random fan sent me the casting call. I made a PowerPoint. My agent sent it to get an audition. Did a regular audition over a recording, did a Zoom with Rose for a director’s session, and then I came in for a chemistry read. Then Rose had me come back in, and then they had me read with an acting coach, and then they had me come back in another time.
At the end of the day, I was like, “Do I have it or not?†Rose goes, “Yes, please. It’s yours.†I was like, Thank God!
Tell me about that chemistry read. I understand you were nervous but then impulsively decided to go have a chat with Kristen?
They had two other people that I was reading against sitting there as well. You get to walk in and basically look at your competition. They had me sitting in the room next to them, where I got to hear them audition too. I could just sit there and second-guess my performance, my life. I wanted to walk around. When I was walking around, I saw Kristen sitting there. And I’m like, If I can just have a little conversation with her, I might be less nervous. I might just get a vibe of what she’s like as a human as opposed to someone I just see on the screen all the time.
I sat down and was like, “Yeah, I live really close to here but it felt like a really long drive because my cat peed in my car and it smells terrible right now.†She’s really cool, so she’s like, “Oh, did your cat pee in your car? Interesting.â€
That’s how I broke the ice. Then, when we went in for our chemistry read, it was playful and fun and just laid-back. It wasn’t with the intensity that the rest of the movie has. It felt like an open playing ground and supportive environment.
It must have worked. Kristen showed up at the screening I attended and said, “I had so much fucking fun making this movie.†But I was curious about the way you related to your character Jackie. She’s quick to throw a punch; you have a background in martial arts. She’s a bodybuilder; you have trained as a bodybuilder. What was on the page and how much did it evolve as you brought in your own sensibility?
We have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences, for sure. I’m such a buttoned-up person. I tend to be on the tenser side and overthink things. I’m not going to be the one to throw the first punch. And Jackie is just so boisterous and out there. She’s just like, I am who I am, and the world can suck it. That’s something this role let me play with. I felt like I had to hold her close and so tight and protect her because she is still vulnerable. I love getting to play characters that might seem strong and powerful — and maybe even in your face — but have a deep-rooted vulnerability to them. Deep down, we all just want to be loved or held or to be a little braver.
Did you and Kristen do anything in particular to develop a rapport?
We didn’t have a lot of time. I booked the job two weeks before we started. So I was more focused on trying to get in shape. The first day of shooting, we were thrown right into the deep end. I think all our intimate scenes were in that first week.
Whoa! Were those your first intimate scenes on-camera?
I did this short movie; I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day. It was a super-low-budget, random thing I did in Indiana, and there was an intimate scene in that. But this was my first time in a professional setting with an intimacy coordinator.
Did having an intimacy coordinator help mitigate some of the potential awkwardness for you?
It did. A lot of people have reservations about working with intimacy coordinators because they’re worried about disrupting the spontaneity or whatever. But, I mean, it’s already in the script. You already know you’re going to do it. The spontaneity’s gone. It’s not real life, right? What the intimacy coordinator did was, right away, we break down the scene and we talk one-on-one. What makes us uncomfortable, what we are fine with, so we are able to just flat out say, “I will do this, I won’t do this,†whatever.
They would meet with Kristen, they would relay that. They’d meet with the director. We would all talk about the scene beforehand with the intimacy coordinator and just talk through the steps. Then when you’re filming, it’s the first time you’re actually touching each other. The spontaneity aspect of it is there. The intimacy of it is there because it’s the first time it’s happening. You’re still in this vulnerable state. And so there’s this really interesting way that it translates.
I was just so anxious that I wanted to make sure Kristen felt safe and comfortable. And she was in the same mind-set. That was where we were able to let loose and have these crazy scenes happen because we knew that we were in a comfortable, safe environment and that we were going to be very respectful to each other and none of us were going to try something rude or stupid.
You hear horror stories about things that can happen in those circumstances without an intimacy coordinator on a film set.
That’s the thing I’m always so paranoid and afraid of: a film horror story. You never want to be involved in any of that! Fortunately, this was a group of professionals. Everybody just wanted to make this really cool movie and not take advantage of anybody.
You began martial arts at a very young age. You also worked in law enforcement for seven years. That’s hardly the traditional Hollywood route. How did you end up here?
The martial arts: I was bullied when I was in kindergarten, so my dad signed me up when I was 5. It wasn’t just to be like, Oh defend yourself. It was a family activity. My dad is an athlete and has been his whole life; it’s how we bonded. My mom is very heavily school-focused and is more of a nerd. She signed us up for any art stuff we could do. We did a lot of music lessons and she found us a commercial agent because she’s like, “My kids are cute.â€
But in a place like Indiana, it was very difficult to see where we fit in. We wouldn’t get a lot of auditions in general because our agent said, “There’s not a lot of mixed-kids’ roles out there.†We weren’t seeing any success, and at a very young age, that told me there’s not really a place for me in that career line. You bundle up a lot of insecurities as you grow older. Oh, I’m not going to be able to be vulnerable enough. Or: I’m not going to be able to cry on cue. Things that you think are important that just aren’t.
By the time I got to college, I was like, I’ve got to come up with a reasonable, steady job. I have to find something that I can make money and support myself on. Like a nine-to-five. I stumbled weirdly into law enforcement. My university had a program where you’re basically a security guard and they send you to police academy. I did that because they pitched it as free room and board. You get to go to all the games for free, all the plays for free. I got to meet the Dalai Lama. I got to escort the Princess of Thailand around. I got all these wild life experiences as a child, basically. Then when it was time to graduate, it was either do an extra year of physics and go a neuroscience route, or do psychology and just go straight to grad school. I was like, I just need a break.
I wound up working for a city police department. I already had all the credentials. I will say it was life experience I otherwise never would have gotten and that I probably, certainly needed because I was naïve. At the end of the day, I had a panic attack where I was like, I’m not doing what I really want to do. I sat down and wrote out the things I wanted. It was weird how this movie came about because they were so linked.
I wanted to get in really good shape and feel really strong. I found a gym, got a trainer, and they suggested bodybuilding. I felt a power in that. At the same time, I wanted to start acting. I found an acting coach who specialized in screen acting and started to do vocal projects to build up my résumé and get confidence in that. It broke down barriers. It allowed me to actually get vulnerable in front of groups of people. It’s weird that those two things are interlinked — finding myself — and then this movie came along. And I’m here now.
You were on something called the Crisis Prevention Team. I’m imagining you in SWAT gear smashing through windows.
It’s almost the opposite. It’s almost like you’re a social worker. You are specially trained to respond to someone who’s having a mental-health issue like schizophrenia. There were a few suicide-in-progress kinds of things where you’re talking people almost back. You can see a shift in someone, when they’re in that state and when they come back and connect with you again. We were trained to work with people with autism and dementia. So it was just coming in with not a heavy hand in situations like that.
Doubling back to bodybuilding for a minute, I understand you entered some amateur competitions around that same time. In Love Lies Bleeding, Jackie is often effectively experiencing ’roid rage. Did you ever see anything like that in your personal life that you could draw upon?
Not that. The people that I knew that were doing steroids, they’re really private about it. Which, I’m like, “Why? Just tell people what you’re doing.†It was more about health issues than rage. I did see some irresponsible relationship things that might’ve come out of extra testosterone or something. You start to see your friends get hospitalized for kidney disease or liver failure. And you’re like, You’re too young for that.
You have become one of the most high-profile non-gender-conforming performers in popular culture these days. I wonder if that makes you feel any sense of responsibility about what you do and the roles you take going forward. Or do you just continue on doing your own thing?
I think I’m a little naïve right now to a responsibility. I’m me. I don’t think of myself that way. But there are stories I want to tell — and there are stories I don’t. There are stories that are dated and that I think are maybe cringe and boring and tired. There are stories that I think people deserve to see. And I think that people deserve to see themselves onscreen. I am very passionate about that because I didn’t for a long time.
It’s also a fun job. I want to tell stupid stories too that don’t matter and that are just silly and fun. I hope that people have grace with that too. I don’t only want to play queer characters. I don’t only want to play in films with a big message.
This movie wouldn’t be this big without Kristen attached to it, period. I’m so grateful that she wanted to do it and is so excited about it and is here promoting it and cheering me on. If I ever have name recognition close to Kristen’s and the ability to help other people tell stories that are so important — I hope that I can.