Katy O’Brian Will Knock You Out

I’m straddling Katy O’Brian on a gymnasium floor and fighting for my life to keep composed. For the record, taking a private jujitsu lesson was her idea. “It’s basically aggressive cuddling,” she’d joked somewhat innocently on the car ride to Kings Combat Williamsburg. The 36-year-old actress is a seasoned martial artist with a third-degree black belt in hapkido, extensive Muay Thai and jujitsu training, and a background in competitive bodybuilding. In other words, she could flip me in an instant. But her superior combat skills are only part of the problem: O’Brian is also, per a recent Pride investigation, the “sexiest sapphic alive,” with a gloriously chiseled physique made for Calvin Klein ads and swoopy boy-band hair that frames her smoldering hazel eyes. Judging by the online evidence, it doesn’t take much for O’Brian to bring a woman to her knees.

O’Brian, who appears in five films this year, models a new kind of Hollywood heartthrob. She is unapologetically strong at a time when women are still pressured into thinness — at her bodybuilding peak, she could deadlift almost 400 pounds — and unapologetically gay when queer media still gets hemmed in by straight tastes. “The global box office is very homophobic,” she states, point blank, over a video call a few weeks after our lesson. So she’s carved out a novel lane for herself. In action blockbusters, she kicks ass with the boys while giving sapphics a reason to pay attention. (“Really, what Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is about is Katy O’Brian’s bicep,” the podcaster Peyton Dix joked about the Tom Cruise spy thriller in June.) At the same time, she’s taking indie roles that expand mainstream perceptions of queer women, who are depicted in Hollywood almost exclusively as glamorous femmes or androgynous waifs.

It’s been an uphill battle. It was only last year, after a decade of professional acting, that she landed her first lead role — and her first unambiguously queer one at that. Starring opposite Kristen Stewart in the A24 neo-noir Love Lies Bleeding, O’Brian broke through as Jackie, a competitive bodybuilder who whirls through small-town New Mexico and picks up Lou (Stewart), a scrawny gym manager who becomes her lover. O’Brian had seen a tweet announcing the casting call and replied cheekily with thirst trap she took while working out: “I’m free.” She auditioned six times for the movie, then, after landing the part, worked out three hours a day to bulk up, delaying bowel surgery for her Crohn’s disease. It was brutal but worth it. “People started to take me seriously for once, not just as a body, even though it was such a body movie,” she says.

She’s in Brooklyn this mid-October weekend promoting two queer projects at NewFest, the largest LGBTQ+ film festival in America: Queens of the Dead, a low-budget zombie horror about Brooklyn drag queens surviving the apocalypse, and Christy, a sports biopic about the champion boxer Christy Martin (played by Sydney Sweeney). Christy is about the toll of athletic greatness, but it’s more about the weight of the patriarchy; Martin, who knew she was a lesbian from a young age, was exploited and almost killed behind the scenes by her manager husband and was forced to suppress her sexuality. It wasn’t hard for O’Brian, who plays Martin’s rival and later wife, Lisa Holewyne, to relate to Martin’s story. She tells me about her first bodybuilding competition at the age of 24. “I was docked points because my swimsuit didn’t fit right, then found out that they also judge you on hair and makeup,” she says. “I was like, So why did I work out if 30 percent of my score is how pretty I looked?”

O’Brian would rather continue to level up her game. As our jujitsu instructor walks us through basic floor maneuvers, she listens, rapt, even though the lesson should be redundant for her, since she’s practiced jiu jitsu for five years and martial arts for 31. “With boxing, if someone is bigger than you, they’re just fucking bigger. But with this, it’s the more technical you can be,” she tells me after the hourlong lesson is up. “Every time I go to a class, I still learn new stuff.”

From an early age, O’Brian felt misunderstood. She grew up mixed race, with both Black and white ancestry, in Indianapolis. “I miss my family, but Indiana itself brings me no joy,” she tells me. She and her youngest brother would dream up imaginary worlds together, so her mom enrolled them in acting lessons and booked them with a small agency. But the agency didn’t know what to do with them. “They would just send us on these auditions, and some of them would be, like, Spanish-speaking. We’d be like, We don’t even speak Spanish,” O’Brian says. Discouraged, she signed up for music classes; at one point, she even considered going to school for marimba.

She ended up in law enforcement. At Indiana University, she majored in psychology and joined the school’s Cadet Officer Program, working security at school events in exchange for free room and board. It was a big responsibility. “By 19 or by 20, I had a badge and a gun,” she remembers. The job could occasionally be glamorous, though; she once met the Dalai Lama when he visited campus. She considered getting her degree in neuroscience but dragged her feet on the physics requirements and wound up working as a police officer for the city of Carmel, Indiana, after graduation. It was a necessary learning experience for someone so sheltered, she says. But she was miserable: “There was a day where I had a panic attack. I took a second, and I was like, You’re not happy. What do you want to do to fix that?” The next day, she found an acting class and joined a gym.

When O’Brian moved to Los Angeles in 2016, she was so committed to acting that she refused to take part-time jobs that might interfere with auditions. Luckily, opportunities started rolling in almost immediately. “For some reason, it was hot to be androgynous and ethnically ambiguous, though they don’t use that term anymore because they know it’s ridiculous,” she explains. She landed her first role, in AMC’s apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, in 2017. Soon came small parts on series like How to Get Away With Murder and Halt and Catch Fire and a regular role on the zombie horror show Z Nation.

Dating wasn’t a priority back then, but she met her wife, Kylie Chi, during her first year in L.A. after auditioning for the lead in Your Move, a student web series Chi wrote and directed. “She was very professional and didn’t hit on me,” O’Brian says. Eager to explore L.A.’s nightlife scene, she invited Chi to an underground party — “a Roaring ’20s speakeasy, ballroom dance, and pie fight” — which Chi had mistaken for a date. Too broke to go out for dinner, O’Brian had even offered to cook for the both of them beforehand. “I made boring bodybuilding foods, like salmon, sweet potatoes, and asparagus or something. And she hates sweet potatoes. The salmon was super-dry. She was probably like, This girl needs help.” (Chi was evidently able to forgive her; the couple married in 2020, and Chi’s Instagram bio reads “wife to sex on a skeleton herself @thekatyo.”)

A relationship fell in O’Brian’s lap, but bigger onscreen roles evaded her. So she reenrolled in acting classes, where she learned to ignore the character descriptions on the page and trust her own instincts: “I always feel if you’re not booking what you want, there’s something that you need to change.” She also came to accept that casting is a political game. When she finally booked Love Lies Bleeding, she wasn’t sure at first if she could hold her own. “I was trying to be confident in my performance and hope that I wasn’t ruining Kristen’s juju being there,” she tells me. On the contrary: The chemistry between them was so electric that online, queer women all but admitted to orgasming in theaters. (It helps that there are actual sex scenes in Loves Lies Bleeding, not just chaste, longing glances.)

When I ask O’Brian how it feels to be publicly thirsted over, she seems bashful. There’s a part of her that still feels like her adolescent self. “I was always such a dork growing up, and I feel like I still am,” she says. “I think if anybody gets to know me, maybe they’d think that I was just boring and lame.” I have a hard time believing that: Edgar Wright, who’d seen Love Lies Bleeding, had specifically thought of her for his remake of the dystopian thriller The Running Man. And when her Twisters co-star, Glen Powell, who also stars in The Running Man, got wind that she’d been cast, he fired off a text to O’Brian that read, “It’s gonna be epic.” In the film, O’Brian plays a gender-flipped version of the reality-television contestant Laughlin, a cowboy-hat-wearing Lothario who likes to ball out at the strip club.

Some queer fans have become so invested in O’Brian being a queer trailblazer that they lashed out in her comments because the character she plays in the rom-com Maintenance Required, which debuted on Prime Video earlier this fall, has a boyfriend. “It took forever for me to be allowed to portray any sexuality onscreen,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I play one character that’s straight, and people are so mad about it.”

O’Brian is not naïve about what it will take for Hollywood executives to hire more queer actors or for attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people to improve generally. “The way that our country is right now, it’s just very clear that we’re moving back to a more conservative place,” she says. (A few weeks after we spoke, Christy bombed at the box office, its lead actress’s appearance and political leanings the subject of so much controversy that it nearly eclipsed the performances in the movie and the real-life story behind it.) In the future, O’Brian tells me, she’s interested in working with auteurs like Park Chan-Wook and Céline Sciamma. She is also writing something of her own, though she’s not sure she can reveal what it is yet. “Since greater responsibility is not really coming, I’m trying to build it,” she says. The Hollywood game may be rigged, but O’Brian is still plotting her next knockout, fighting to win.