Katy O’Brian, the rising actress who gained notices with Love Lies Bleeding, is joining Glen Powell in The Running Man, Paramount’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel.
Edgar Wright is directing the feature and co-wrote the script with Michael Bacall.
King’s Running Man, published in 1982 and written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, was set in 2025 in an America under a totalitarian regime that uses violent game shows to placate the disenfranchised masses.
The story centered on one desperate man, needing money for his sick daughter, who joins the most popular show, The Running Man, in which teams of killers hunt down contestants. The longer that a contestant survives, the more money that person makes. But as the game show’s producers and killers will find out, this desperate man will break all the rules and expose the show’s dark secrets.
Powell is playing that desperate man. O’Brian would be one of the contestants on the show. Paramount is releasing the film on Nov. 21, 2025.
Simon Kinberg, Nira Park and Wright are producing.
While O’Brian has worked steadily with appearances on Black Lightning and The Mandalorian, the actress broke out in a major way starring opposite Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding, the well-received crime thriller in which she played a bodybuilder who falls for Stewart’s gym manager. The movie had a splashy debut at Sundance earlier this year and was released by A24.
Since then, the actress has been on a hot streak, among other things booking a part in the new Mission: Impossible movie for Paramount and appearing with Powell in Twisters, the hit disaster movie that Universal released this summer.
O’Brian is repped by Gersh, Luber Roklin Entertainment, RCM Talent & Management and Yorn, Levine
