It was supposed to be Katy O’Brian’s big break. After spending eight years toiling away in bit parts on TV, she had landed a key role in the second season of The Mandalorian. Then, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.
“I was so nervous every day, and I didn’t realize, on top of all of that, I was battling Crohn’s, so I felt like my performance was terrible,” O’Brian tells Inverse.
O’Brian was diagnosed with Crohn’s in 2020, shortly after she got the part in Mandalorian. Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the digestive system and causes everything from rashes to arthritis to fatigue. For O’Brian, it was the latter.
“I was exhausted all the time, and one or two lines and I couldn’t remember them, and I just felt really unwell and weird,” she says. “That season just was like a blur, and I thought, ‘OK, I’m just going to go deliver these one or two lines.’”
“I’ve been hustling for eight years.”
But with just those one or two lines as a lowly employee in the First Order, O’Brian’s Elia Kane became a breakout character of Season 2 as fans speculated that this background actor with a surprising amount of screen time might be a resistance spy hiding among the enemy.
“I was surprised how many people paid attention to her because screen-time-wise, I think I probably was on for a total of 30 seconds,” O’Brian says.
So it was even more of a shock when O’Brian was brought back for Season 3 in a more substantial appearance as surprise villain. Elia’s betrayal of Dr. Pershing (Omid Abtahi) in the acclaimed Season 3 episode “The Convert” (from Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung) was what made O’Brian feel like she really, finally “broke out.”
“Mandalorian really helped in a lot of ways. It gave me a lot of confidence. It gave me a lot of exposure,” she says. “It exposes you to a lot of people in a short period of time.”
Four years after she first made an appearance as Elia Kane, it certainly feels like O’Brian’s star is about to go supersonic. In March, she had her first leading part in a feature film with the sensually surreal crime thriller Love Lies Bleeding, which has her tapping into her bodybuilding roots to play the ’roided-up love interest to Kristen Stewart. She most recently appears in the ensemble for Twisters, as one of the wild storm-chasing crew of YouTube star Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), reuniting her with the director of her latter Mandalorian episode, Lee Isaac Chung, in a small-but-memorable role. And next, she’s set to join the cast of the upcoming Mission: Impossible movie, a gig that could launch her into the stratosphere (and which made it very hard to schedule this interview). But even as the opportunities come in (including a brief appearance in the MCU in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania last year), O’Brian is wary about how easy it is to be trapped by success.
“I’ve been hustling for eight years. I, at one point, was a series regular, and right after that, went straight back to like one line [of dialogue],” she says.
But even if O’Brian doesn’t see it yet, there’s no denying that she’s steadily becoming a more prolific actor, albeit one who refuses to play by Hollywood’s rules and isn't willing to see herself typecast into genre roles despite not looking like a conventional movie star.
O’Brian always knew she wanted to act. As a child, she and her brother would audition for commercials, but after their agent kept giving them Spanish-speaking gigs, their mother grew frustrated and pulled them out of the business.
“My brother and I are biracial,” O’Brian says, explaining her mixed African American and European American heritage. “They would assume we were Hispanic. They’d send us out on these roles with Spanish dialogue, and we’re like, ‘We don’t do this. We don’t speak Spanish.’”
So O’Brian gave up her acting dreams and got a job as a police officer. She developed a passion for bodybuilding, even competing twice in 2014 and 2015. But she never lost the acting bug.
“I started taking acting classes, and I just knew that’s just what I wanted to do,” O’Brian says.
“So I decided to go all-in and go to L.A. and do the thing.”
“Androgynous women [often] get trapped in a sci-fi or a horror or a campy kind of world, because people are so afraid of different looks and different bodies on screen.”
She honed her skills in a handful of short films in 2015 and 2016. Then, in 2017, O’Brian landed her first major TV gig on The Walking Dead, which was a bit of a shock to the system for someone used to indie productions. “It was Season 9 or something, so at this point, it was like a machine,” O’Brian recalls. “It was really interesting to fall into a show that was no longer figuring itself out, that was just very go, go, go.”
O’Brian recalls her first day being a confusing whirlwind of crewmembers redirecting her where to go and hours of being sprayed in blood and “covered in zombie skin.” “You’re being jostled around, and it was like I had no idea what was going on. I never knew where I was going to be. It was such a massive set that I had to be wrangled,” O’Brian says with a laugh.
Her embarrassing first-gig story: She didn’t realize that, after the arduous process of getting put in zombie makeup, she was supposed to return to the makeup trailer to get it taken off at the end of the day. “I just drove home like that!” O’Brian says. “And I didn’t know that you have to take it off with alcohol, so I’m showering and it’s not coming off, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m stuck like this.’ It took a week for it all to finally come off.”
O’Brian doesn’t remember much about this first role, except that she originally read for four pages, and when it came time to shoot, her part had been reduced to two lines. But, in a way, she was grateful her first gig was so minimal. “Weirdly enough, I think it was literally all I could handle, because I got so nervous and I was like, ‘What’s my one line again?’”
O’Brian spent the next eight years getting bit parts, and sometimes recurring roles, in shows like Black Lightning, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Westworld, but her favorite — and one that people might not have heard of — was her character in Z Nation, a SyFy zombie series in which she landed her first gig as a series regular. “It was one of the lowest budget shows on television, and the cast and crew, everyone just poured their hearts into it. And we could barely even afford lighting, so we shot everything outside as much as we could during the daytime so that we didn’t have to light,” O’Brian says. “So I have a special place in my heart for horror, but also for low-budget, almost guerilla-esque shooting because of that show.”
It might be why, for O’Brian’s first leading role in a movie, she pursued Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding, a strange, twisted noir thriller imbued with a dark undercurrent of magical realism. She fondly refers to it as her “weird little movie,” and her performance as aspiring bodybuilder Jackie Cleaver, who falls into a trippy spiral after her girlfriend Lou (Stewart) introduces her to steroids, earned her critical praise. It’s also a job she somewhat famously earned through the power of the Internet — though O’Brian is quick to assert she got the part through the normal, exhaustive audition process, not just through a cheeky tweet.
“It's just such a weird business and I have no idea what’s going to happen in the future.”
“I think the producers saw that way later as a joke, and it was a joke,” O’Brian says. “I actually put a PowerPoint presentation together, had [my agent] resubmit, send it again, and got the audition.”
O’Brian went through six auditions for the part, but after the last one, finally had enough. “I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to change what I’m doing if you have any notes. If you don’t like it, you have to find someone you like because I’m not going to sit up here and be the wrong person for the role.’” But director Glass fought for O’Brian, and she got the job. It’s a movie that O’Brian is proud of, not just for the strength of her performance, but for what it means as an androgynous-looking woman like her. “I think oftentimes, especially more androgynous women, get trapped in a sci-fi or a horror or a campy kind of world, because people are so afraid of different looks and different bodies on screen,” O’Brian says. “So I’m hoping that it at least shows that I can branch out of that realm, and do that as well.”
But her time on Love Lies Bleeding offered another trial. During the production of the crime thriller, she was told the scar tissue that had built up in her intestines due to her Crohn’s disease had to be removed. “They were surprised that I wasn’t in the hospital,” O’Brian says. “So fortunately, I had a surgeon that was like, ‘If you don’t feel it, we can wait until you’re done,’ and that was my saving grace because I had not only Love Lies Bleeding to complete, but immediately after, reshoots for Ant-Man. So I had to not only stay in shape and work out rigorously, but I had two projects to complete back to back, and a surgery would’ve just screwed everything up.”
She waited until Love Lies Bleeding was over to receive the surgery. “I was stitched up, and my abdomen is still all scarred up and stuff,” O’Brian says. “It was scary because it’s always in the back of your head like, ‘Oh, my intestines could explode.’ It’s fun.”
O’Brian is remarkably casual for all this talk about intestines exploding and major surgeries. But as I continue to chat with her, I come to realize that this is her whole attitude to both her personal and professional life. She’s the kind of person that takes it as it comes: major surgery? It can wait a few weeks so I can look good for this sex scene with Kristen Stewart. Chung calls her up to shoot for a few weeks on Twisters? She’s there. “It was a very last minute ‘rush over here and try on some outfits and go to set’ [situation],” O’Brian recalls of how she was cast in Twisters. “I got the script. They told me I had two hours to say yes or no, but it really was just like, if Isaac wants me there, I’m there.”
Still, it was a relatively easy gig, O’Brian says. “I get to chill in a big RV most of the time, which is great.”
As for Mission: Impossible 8, it was even more of an unusual situation. O’Brian recalls auditioning over a year ago and hearing nothing back… until she was asked to read again for director Christopher McQuarrie. “And in talking to McQuarrie, it was just based off of our conversation because he wanted to have a chat with me, and we had a chat and wound up really connecting.”
Always the busy actor, O’Brian doesn’t even have time to participate in the Tom Cruise “film school” that her Twisters co-star Powell recently underwent (“It’s optional!” she says), because she’s working on another project right now. But as she learned after her early career successes, stardom is never guaranteed.
“It's just such a weird business and I have no idea what’s going to happen in the future,” O’Brian says. “I might never work again. Who knows?”
