Verge Flashback: Katie O'Grady Set to Shock and Awe in Rid of Me

How did you get to know and develop Meris?

Well, I look a lot different than Meris, is the first thing. Meris is about 15 pounds lighter than I am wet; she's tiny and frail and has long brown hair. I've always had blond hair and blue eyes and walk into a room and try to find as many friends as possible. Meris is the exact opposite: She hides and doesn't want to be seen or know how to start up a conversation. That appealed to me immediately. I decided to work from the outside in. The first thing I did was dye my hair about six months before we started shooting. And I lost weight, so I could just kind of experience her fragility -- almost like a bird. A little, wounded bird. That alone taught me a lot about who she is. From there I did my work on her and my research on her and her life. What she wants isn't that much different than anybody, and I realized that it wasn't really about how she looks. We all just don't want to feel alone, or like we're on the outside looking in. We all want to be a part of something great.

Meris wasn't any different than me in that way, and I found a lot more similarities than I thought when I started looking into developing Meris. And I also recognized as I got to know her better that it doesn't matter who you are: We all have the experience of walking into a room and being the last person anyone wants to talk to or notice. That has nothing to do with how you look sometimes; it has to do with who you are. Meris's journey to figure out who she is was something I was going through at the exact same time. I think she taught me that lesson: Just be who you are and don't make any excuses for it. It was a great process.

To what degree, then, did you find Meris overlapping with you?

Meris was so busy trying to make everybody love her that she forgot to love herself. She was so busy trying to be perfect -- the best wife, the best cook, make all the right choices and say all the right things to fit in with Mitch's friends, and I think that I can relate to that. We overlap in that I learned through her that that is not the way to live your life. The way to live your life is to be who you are. That'll speak to some people, and won't speak to others, but it's much better to live forthright. That sounds really corny, I understand, and it might just be a certain stage of life. But I definitely learned that lesson through her and was able to let go. That's what Meris was doing: She's holding on so tight that she's almost suffocating herself and everybody around her. Then when she meets up with her best friend Trudy, Trudy teaches her to let go. For me, Meris was that best friend who taught me to let go.

My life is drastically different than when I started playing her. Drastically. It's a pretty big, cathartic movement in my life, and again, I know it sounds cliché. But it wasn't for me. It was about finding out that working so hard to fit in with certain people is not the answer. But working hard to be yourself in your own life and working toward what matters to you is the answer. It just just changed for me. My perspective changed on life. My friends and people around me changed. My time and what I focused on changed. That's what I think you get from the movie. Or I hope that's what you get.

Still, it's a dark comedy -- and you guys really go for the awkwardness of some of these scenarios.

Yeah, we did. In fact, when we went through the first read-through of the script, I had never said Maris's words out loud. We didn't know it was funny. We really didn't. We thought we were making kind of a drama. We didn't quite realize how funny it was going to be until Maris started responding to other characters -- and how truly awkward those moments were. I think James takes everybody to the edge; it's almost, almost enough of the torture she experiences and the situations she finds herself in, and then he brings everybody back. That's the best part about the film! You're almost ready to break, and then he hauls you back in. It's not just a black comedy, either. It's kind of a romance -- of her with herself, her with her best friend, and her trying to find people to like her for who she is. It's a lot of different things.

It sets the tone right away with the introductory scene, which is pretty shocking. Was that always intended as the opening?

Oh, no, no, no. That was later in the script. We did a cut originally without it, and both of us watched it and said, "Something is missing, something is missing." I said, "Why don't we put that scene at the beginning?" And he took it and deepened it and added it to the beginning. For us, it immediately lets the viewer know, "You have no idea what's going to happen for the rest of this film." You're not expecting... that. I don't think anyone's expecting that. "Oh my God, what was that?! I'm not sure how I feel about that!" I wasn't sure how I felt about it when I did it, either. It was difficult, for sure.

What about when you read it in the script?

My mom had a panic attack for me. She was like, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do this. If this film has any success, do you want to be known as that actress?" I said, "Well, that's not something you can think about." When you're doing a project, you have to think about why this person is hurting that bad. For her it's so symbolic -- this blood, sweat and tears coming out of her body. It comes across as her being desperate to have her voice heard.

So what's next for you -- short-term? Long-term?

I definitely want to keep working in feature films. I just produced a film about teen bullying. I'm not in that project, but I produced it and am finishing up the editing on it. Then we have a couple other scripts we're considering. One is a 1940s screwball comedy called Hot in the Zipper -- it's like a Manhattan story about these three ladies and their sexual adventures. And Look How Pretty is a romantic comedy that James is writing, and I'm really interested in playing that part. And I just worked on Portlandia. But nothing else is really happening other than getting this film out there right now. That's my focus: Getting Rid of Me out there and figuring where I'm going next.

Rid of Me opens Friday in New York City and elsewhere throughout the end of the year and into 2012; check out the film's Web site for more details.

[This is a slightly edited version of a Verge feature that was published during the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.]

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