Brittany O'Grady Is on the Job

Brittany O'Grady has never worked an office job. Which is one reason she was thrilled to land a starring role on The Consultant, a darkly comic workplace thriller set at a tech company called CompWare. The series debuts February 24 on Prime Video.

"I was really excited about creating a story that revolves around the workplace," the actor says, noting she had plenty of people to turn to for guidance. "A lot of my friends work in corporate America or a nine-to-five."

On The Consultant, based on Bentley Little's 2015 novel of the same name, O'Grady plays Elaine, an ambitious assistant at CompWare. After tragedy strikes in the office, a strange consultant named Mr. Patoff (Christoph Waltz, also an executive producer) takes over and creates a Lord of the Flies atmosphere.

Initially, O'Grady was intimidated to work with Waltz, who won best supporting actor Oscars for Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. But it proved to be a fun and rewarding experience and, she says, "It was a career goal to be able to work with someone of that caliber."

A native of Arlington, Virginia, O'Grady has been acting for as long as she can remember. She performed in professional theater productions in the D.C. area before moving to Los Angeles at seventeen. Before long, she was acting in series such as Fox's Star and Apple TV+'s Little Voice and booking roles in the films Above Suspicion and Black Christmas. More recently, O'Grady was featured in Sometimes I Think About Dying, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month.

But it was playing mean girl Paula on season one of The White Lotus that put her on the map."I'm so grateful," O'Grady says of the Emmy-winning HBO hit, "to have been a part of such an awesome series that so many people enjoy."

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #1, 2023, under the title, "On the Job."