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?!’”.