Brittany O’Grady, the White Lotus actress whose Jumanji role is still a secret

Brittany O'Grady

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 2, 1996 Arlington, Virginia, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	A House of Dynamite, It's What's Inside, Sometimes I Think About Dying

Brittany O’Grady keeps returning to one kind of scene: a young woman seated at a table with people who have more money or more power than she does, registering what they cannot see about themselves. As Paula in the first season of The White Lotus, she spent a week at a Hawaiian resort with a Freud paperback and a growing contempt for the family paying her way. In The Consultant she was the assistant who sensed the danger in a new boss before anyone else did. Her next job is the largest production she has been part of, Jake Kasdan’s Jumanji: Open World, and Sony has still not said who she plays.

That outsider’s eye has a source she has talked about openly. O’Grady grew up in Arlington, Virginia, the daughter of an Irish American father, Mike O’Grady, and an African American mother with Creole roots in New Orleans who worked as a television reporter. Being biracial narrowed the parts she could go out for long before acting was a living. “When I was a kid, I never was allowed to play my own race because I didn’t look my own race,” she told Paper magazine after the White Lotus finale, explaining that she understood Paula’s position at that table “because I’m biracial.”

She finished Washington-Liberty High School a year early and moved to Los Angeles with her sister, then enrolled at Pepperdine University in Malibu in the spring of 2015. She has described the private Christian campus as a culture shock for a mixed-race student, and she left after three semesters, once the auditions began turning into jobs. Pepperdine did leave her one thing: it is where she met Ben Huyard, whom she married in 2022.

The early television work was small, a single episode of Trophy Wife and then eleven episodes of the CW drama The Messengers. The break came from Lee Daniels, who cast her as Simone Davis in Star, his Fox musical drama about three young singers trying to build a girl group in Atlanta, opposite Jude Demorest and Ryan Destiny, with Queen Latifah in the cast. O’Grady sang on screen through three seasons and 48 episodes, from December 2016 until Fox cancelled the show in May 2019. A fan campaign and repeated promises from Daniels about a revival have kept the title alive online; no new episodes have followed.

Film arrived the same year. She took a supporting part in Phillip Noyce’s Above Suspicion, opposite Emilia Clarke, and played one of the sorority sisters hunted across campus in Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas remake for Blumhouse, with Imogen Poots in the lead. In July 2020 she finally carried a series: Apple TV+’s Little Voice, created by Sara Bareilles and Jessie Nelson and produced by J. J. Abrams, cast her as Bess King, a young singer-songwriter trying to get heard in New York, singing original songs by Bareilles. Apple cancelled it after one season.

Then came Mike White. The White Lotus premiered on HBO in July 2021, and O’Grady played Paula, the college friend Olivia Mossbacher, played by Sydney Sweeney, brings along on the family holiday, half guest and half witness. Paula starts an affair with Kai, a young resort employee, and, stung by the family’s breezy talk about colonialism and privilege, hands him the code to the Mossbachers’ safe. “I took a lot of my own personal experiences of sitting at a table where I felt like people were out of touch,” she said of the part.

That arc is also where the tidy story of her breakout gets more complicated. Paula is written as the show’s sharpest critic of the family, yet the robbery she sets in motion lands on Kai, while she flies home with a cooled friendship and nothing worse. Some viewers read that as Mike White’s whole point; a column from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans in the Rafu Shimpo argued the series squandered its chance to say something sharper about race. The season collected ten Emmys, none of them for her. Her leading work has drawn cooler notices: critics gave the first season of Star a 35 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and The A.V. Club, while warm on Little Voice, faulted what it called a scattered lead performance. So far, her best reviews have come from the edge of the frame.

The years since have alternated between ensembles and small films she leads. In Prime Video‘s The Consultant, in 2023, she played Elaine Hayman, an assistant at a mobile-gaming company taken over by Christoph Waltz’s sinister fixer, and Entertainment Weekly’s Kristen Baldwin singled out her “wary longing.” She had a supporting role as Sophie in Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, starring Daisy Ridley, and took the lead, Shelby, in Greg Jardin’s It’s What’s Inside, a body-swap horror comedy that Netflix bought at Sundance in January 2024 for 17 million dollars, the largest deal of that festival. She played Sammi opposite Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick in Michael J. Weithorn’s The Best You Can, which premiered at Tribeca in June 2025, and led Pedro Kos’s found-footage thriller In Our Blood, released in October 2025.

The biggest stage of that stretch belonged to other people. In Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, which competed at Venice in September 2025 and reached Netflix that October, she is Lily Baerington, the wife of Gabriel Basso‘s deputy national security adviser, a figure at the edge of a film about a missile closing in on Chicago.

Two releases now set the terms of what comes next. Monitor, a horror film written and directed by Matt Black and Ryan Polly, gives her the lead as Maggie; it premiered in the Midnighter section at SXSW in March 2026, and Searchlight Pictures, which acquired it there, has dated the US release for April 16, 2027. Before that comes Jumanji: Open World, the fifth film in the series, with Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan back as their avatars. O’Grady joined the cast alongside Burn Gorman in October 2025, filming in Los Angeles wrapped at the end of March 2026, and the film opens in US theaters on December 25, 2026.

Off screen she keeps the circle close: her Star co-stars Ryan Destiny, Jude Demorest and Amiyah Scott were bridesmaids at her wedding. On Christmas Day, audiences will learn whether Kasdan has cast her once more as the one who notices, or, for once, as the one everybody else is watching.

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Tags: actors, actresses, The White Lotus, Sydney Sweeney, A House of Dynamite, Jumanji: Open World, Brittany O'Grady, Lee Daniels

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