White Lotus star Brittany O’Grady in new film It’s What’s Inside

Actor Brittany O'Grady attends the 2024 Beyond Fest premiere of "It's What's Inside" at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood in Los Angeles. Photo / Getty Images

Years before she turned heads in HBO’s The White Lotus, before she landed a lead in the Fox drama Star, before she anchored Netflix’s new comedic horror movie, It’s What’s Inside, Brittany O’Grady was a Northern Virginia kid making small waves in local theatre. One day, while rehearsing at Synetic Theatre in her hometown of Arlington, O’Grady made a faux-pas: She fainted.

As O’Grady recalls it, she had been chatting while the physical-theatre company’s co-founder, Irina Tsikurishvili, gave instructions to the cast. When the choreographer called out the teenage performer, her embarrassment proved overwhelming.

“When someone yells at me or when I know that I did something wrong, my body shuts down,” O’Grady says. Plus: She had neglected to eat breakfast that day. “I noticed, ‘Oh, God, I can’t see anything. I’m standing up, and everything’s black.’ And then I just went, ‘Oh, no, I’m going down.’”

“Everybody laughed, like this was a performance,” Tsikurishvili says now. “I’m watching, and this joke goes a little bit longer than it should be. And I was like, ‘Brittany? Brittany? Brittany?!’”

Tsikurishvili was leaning over O’Grady, tears in her eyes, when the actress regained consciousness. At the time, O’Grady was mortified. Nowadays, the 28-year-old sees her tendency to be an emotional open book as core to her acting. She feels, and it shows up in the work.

“I’ve been told my whole life to get a tougher skin,” O’Grady says. “I have now fully accepted that my sensitivity, that what I physically and emotionally feel, is actually a superpower.”

Why does O’Grady feel as intensely as she feels? Perhaps her background as an eager-to-please child performer or, she reasons, Catholic guilt. Maybe it’s a quality she inherited from her parents. Whatever the case, it can have real stakes.

After graduating from Washington-Liberty High School a year early and heading to Los Angeles to live with her sister, O’Grady enrolled at Pepperdine University in Malibu in the spring of 2015. Plenty of good came from her college experience: She met her future husband, Ben Huyard, on the first day of classes, and the duo later shared a fulfilling semester in Shanghai. But O’Grady, the daughter of a black mother and Europeanfather, confronted bigotry and bullying among the student body at the private Christian university - a personal gut-punch and a culture shock after growing up in progressive Arlington.

“I have now fully accepted that my sensitivity, that what I physically and emotionally feel, is actually a superpower,” O’Grady says. Photo / Melissa Isabel Quiñones for The Washington Post

“There were times where other people did not see the value of me, maybe because I didn’t look a certain way to them,” says O’Grady, who dropped out after three semesters as her acting career took off. “I was like, ‘Why do people feel like they can treat me this way? Is it because of my background? Is it because of my biracial identity?’ That was a big aha, painful moment for me.”

It’s one O’Grady drew from when she took on the role of Shelby, the put-upon girlfriend at the centre of It’s What’s Inside. After premiering to critical acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the delightfully dizzying thriller hits Netflix on Friday.

Social media-driven jealousy and artificial intimacy loom large in the trippy film, about a pre-wedding bash where a high-tech party game allows eight friends to hop bodies. O’Grady’s Shelby is already engaging in such escapism when we meet her before that twisty get-together, hiding her dark curls beneath a blonde wig and cosplaying as a European influencer friend for her indifferent boyfriend (James Morosini).

“When I got older, I started to realise that some people like to gravitate to people that look like them, where they value people that maybe look more Euro-centric or value people more who fit the mold - having straight hair, having thin eyebrows, being very thin,” O’Grady says. “Shelby tries to kind of erase herself to become more attractive to her significant other, and I’ve definitely felt that way.”

“It was important for me for that character to be biracial,” adds the film’s writer and director, Greg Jardin, who is half-Asian. “You might feel insecure about where you belong because you sort of belong to two groups but also belong to neither. That’s the thing that we spoke about a lot.”

Jardin, a Silver Spring native who also bonded with O’Grady over their DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) roots, says that her empathy makes her “every director’s dream.” He also highlights her varied body of work as a reason he cast her in a part that, because of the body-swapping conceit, required her to take on several characters over the 18-day shoot in Portland, Oregon.

In Star, O’Grady played an up-and-coming R’n’B artist processing the trauma of an abusive foster home. Although she inhabited another musician in the well-regarded but short-lived Apple TV Plus series Little Voice, that character - a plucky singer-songwriter with big dreams and bigger impostor syndrome - sang a different tune. Last year, she starred opposite Christoph Waltz as a fiercely ambitious corporate climber in the surrealist Prime Video series The Consultant.

But most will recognise O’Grady from season 1 of The White Lotus, in which she played the righteously resentful friend tagging along on a White family’s lavish Hawaiian vacation. Shooting in Maui at the height of the pandemic, O’Grady had no reason to believe the Mike White-penned show would be a cultural phenomenon. After the 2021 series captured the zeitgeist and a bounty of Emmy gold, O’Grady suddenly found herself riding the White Lotus wave.

“I’m usually used to having jobs with very niche but very passionate audiences,” she says. “So I guess more high-profile, fancy people started to realise that my work existed.”

In The White Lotus, Sydney Sweeney (Olivia) and Brittany O'Grady (Paula) put on what many viewers described as "terrifying" performances. Photo / Supplied

O’Grady’s Paula is the picture of snide entitlement early in The White Lotus. But her character takes a turn in the fourth episode, when Paula witnesses the hotel’s indigenous staffers performing a native dance for the European guests’ amusement. Through one steely stare, O’Grady conveys an abundance of gear-turning emotion - embarrassment, indignation, exasperation - that sets Paula’s ultimate arc in motion.

“Brittany is an extraordinary actor, and I think underneath that, she’s an extraordinary person,” says Fred Hechinger, O’Grady’s co-star in The White Lotus. “She’s really all feeling and so sensitive and kind of psychically aware of other people’s emotions and thoughts. She’s really attuned, and I think you feel it in her performances.”

O’Grady has been particularly in demand lately, shooting a guest spot on the CBS procedural Elsbeth and filming the forthcoming movie Connescence opposite Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. Next, she’s attached to an untitled film that Kathryn Bigelow is making for Netflix.

Then there’s the publicity blitz for It’s What’s Inside, which has brought O’Grady to a Midtown Manhattan hotel on this mid-September afternoon.

Raised in a household of five, O’Grady credits her parents with shaping her ambivert personality. She says her father, who works in higher education financial aid, imbued her with compassion. Her mother, a communications professional who used to chair the Arlington County School Board, sparked her drive and ambition. These days, O’Grady lives in Atlanta, where she shot Star from 2016 to 2019, but regularly returns to Arlington to sleep in her childhood bedroom, get her caffeine fix at Northside Social and enjoy the odd boat ride on the Potomac River.

O’Grady’s parents immersed her in performance as far back as she can remember, signing her up for commercial acting gigs, dance classes and piano lessons. When her first-grade class performed a version of The Tempest, O’Grady set herself apart by insisting on portraying the monstrous Caliban instead of the ingenue Miranda. By the time she was 13, she had booked professional stage work in Signature Theatre’s 2007 production of The Witches of Eastwick and Ford’s Theatre’s 2009 staging of A Christmas Carol.

But it wasn’t until O’Grady started taking classes at Synetic that she identified acting as a passion. The idiosyncratic company - a dance- and movement-based theatre troupe founded by Georgian immigrants Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili - challenged her physically and engaged her creatively in newfound ways. To this day, O’Grady refers to the Tsikurishvilis as her “creative parents.” In turn, Paata calls her their “artistic child.”

“When I was working with them, I knew, ‘Oh, I want to do this the rest of my life,’” says O’Grady, who starred in Synetic’s largely or entirely dialogue-free productions of Don Quixote, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Three Musketeers. “I got to work with adults that treated me like an adult. I would go to school, and I had my normal life - I was in band, I did theatre after school, I had my dance classes. But I was Brittany at school during the day, and then I had this whole other side of me at night that fed my soul.”

Looking back on O’Grady’s time at Synetic, when she often performed before a few dozen patrons in the Crystal City underground, Irina remembers a girl who was “a little bit scared.” Paata recalls how nervous she used to get waiting in the wings. Still, he says, “she was already a star - a little star.”

And now? “She’s becoming a big star.”