Although I didn’t know much about the discipline, English filmmaker Rose Glass was attracted to the idea of writing a story about a female bodybuilder.. He found it interesting to investigate the psychology behind those who decide to develop this practice and, as he delved into it, the more he became convinced that he was moving in the right direction.
The director of Saint Maud (2019) teamed up with his compatriot Weronika Tofilska in writing a script that would revolve around a sport that he considers “slightly anarchic but beautiful and strange,” in his own words. At the center of the plot is the intense romance that is born between Lou, the manager of a gym in a lost town, and Jackie, a young bodybuilder who makes a stop on her way to a competition in Las Vegas.
He signed Kristen Stewart to play the first role, but finding the second paper was a headache, basically because they underestimated how difficult it is to find people who practice that discipline and also act. Katy O’Brian (Indiana, 1989), who found out about the call through Twitter, met that requirement and auditioned.
“I used to compete in bodybuilding. She was a fan, as Jackie is. I was never professional. “I wasn’t very good,” she says via video call to Worship. “The writing was so good that it was instant and easy for me to see who Jackie was. I felt like, for some reason, I knew this person, I knew why she was doing the things she was doing, and I felt like she could authentically portray that. And I’m glad they gave me this opportunity.”
His interpretation is one of the high points of Love, lies and blood (this Thursday, May 2 in Chilean cinemas), a film in which Rose Glass gives her own reinterpretation of that kind of subgenre about two lovers protagonists of a spiral of murders and passion. “She has a perverse, wild and unique imagination,” she highlights about the filmmaker.
“I love that he made it campy, I love that he made it kind of fun, to allow us to have these moments of extreme violence. I think making her larger than life, multi-genre, allows her to bring out whatever she wants to talk about.”
Although his career is on the rise – he has participated in The Mandalorian and will be in the eighth installment of Mission: Impossible – his acting experience is much more limited than Stewart’s. He assures that he did not perceive that difference in working with the actress who played Lady Di in Spencer (2021).
“She is lovely, very relaxed. She was very excited about this story and very excited about her character and about working with Rose and helping her succeed. I think that was really inspiring. “She would be working with someone who is 100% ready to do this and who will put her all into the film,” says O’Brian. “When we got to set, it was really no different, she was excited every day. He treated me as an equal, even though I have much less experience. “She is very collaborative.”
Love, lies and blood It has had a solid run at film festivals – it debuted at Sundance and Berlin – but it had a sad episode in Belgium a couple of weeks ago. At the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, some attendees loudly uttered homophobic and misogynistic comments while the film was being screened. In response to this reaction, a group of women left the room indignantly, while those responsible for those screams continued inside. After the function, incidents also occurred and, according to the organization, three situations of physical violence were recorded.
Katy O’Brian is still confused by what happened, not being able to fully understand how the matter escalated to that point without the pageant intervening. “For me it’s very simple: if someone is causing a problem she should leave the cinema,” she notes. “The emotional impact of that is traumatic. It’s really discouraging and disappointing. I hope that maybe they can learn from this and set better boundaries and have better protections in the future.”
