Rose Byrne and Mary Bronstein Are Doing It Again, and This Time They Brought Jenna Ortega

A coach and her prodigy are about to become the most dangerous relationship in a Warner Bros. sports drama, and the two women building it have already proven what they can do together.

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• The Announcement
• What “Nasty” Is Actually About
• Why This Reunion Matters
• Isabella Jarosz and the Path From the Black List
• Jenna Ortega Steps Behind the Camera Too
• Clockwork’s Bet on Prestige Indie
• Where “Nasty” Sits in Both of Their Calendars
• What Happens Next

Warner Bros.’ new specialty label Clockwork confirmed on July 16 that Rose Byrne and Jenna Ortega will star in “Nasty,” a sports drama directed by Mary Bronstein and based on a script by Isabella Jarosz. The reveal arrived with a teaser announcement built around artwork drawn by Bronstein herself rather than a conventional cast photo, paired with a blunt tagline that doubles as a thesis statement for the project: if you do not hate it, you do not love it. Cameras are set to roll this fall, with a theatrical release currently planned for 2027.

The choice to lead with hand drawn artwork rather than a polished cast photo or a slick logo treatment says something about how Clockwork wants this specific film to be read from the outset. Plenty of studio announcements arrive as a clean title card and a press release. Pairing the reveal with something that looks handmade, credited directly to the director, signals that the label is selling an authored point of view first and a marquee cast second, even with two performers as recognizable as Byrne and Ortega attached.

The pairing puts Byrne back in front of the camera for Bronstein for the second time, following the two women’s collaboration on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a film that reshaped how the industry talks about Byrne as a dramatic lead. It also brings Ortega into the fold both as a co star and as a producer, working alongside Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap, the company behind “Barbie” and “Saltburn.”

If you don’t hate it, you don’t love it.

NASTY. Starring Jenna Ortega & Rose Byrne. Directed by Mary Bronstein. Written by Isabella Jarosz.

In theaters 2027.

Art by Mary Bronstein. pic.twitter.com/vWFoM1t8ji

— Warner Bros. Clockwork (@clockwork_wb) July 16, 2026

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The logline is short and does most of the work on its own. “Nasty” follows a prodigiously talented gymnast fighting for a spot on the Olympic team, who comes to realize that her most dangerous opponent is not another athlete but her own coach. It is a premise built for close, claustrophobic filmmaking, the kind that lives or dies on the tension between two people locked in a single room or a single gym rather than on spectacle, and coverage of the project has already drawn a comparison to “Whiplash” for that reason, another film about mentorship curdling into something closer to abuse.

Byrne is set to play the coach, putting her opposite Ortega’s gymnast in what sounds like an inversion of the maternal, caretaking energy Byrne brought to “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Where that film asked Byrne to play a woman barely holding her own life together while still trying to care for everyone around her, “Nasty” appears to ask her to play someone who has weaponized care itself, using the language of mentorship and discipline as a form of control over a young athlete who cannot easily walk away.

Gymnastics in particular has become an unusually rich setting for exploring exactly that kind of dynamic on screen and off it. Coaching relationships in the sport often begin when athletes are still children, compress an entire career into a narrow physical window, and depend on a level of trust and physical intimacy that leaves very little room for an athlete to question authority without risking the opportunity itself. Setting a psychological thriller inside that world rather than a more adult dominated sport gives “Nasty” a built in power imbalance to work with before a single scene is shot, and gives Byrne and Ortega a genuinely uncomfortable dynamic to build a film around rather than a more conventional mentor and student arc.

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Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” was the kind of film that tends to define a director’s next decade. Byrne played a mother juggling her daughter’s mysterious illness, an absent husband, a missing person case, and an increasingly fraught relationship with her own therapist, and the performance earned her nominations across nearly every major awards body, including her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, along with recognition from BAFTA, the Critics’ Choice Awards, and a Golden Globe win in the Best Actress Musical or Comedy category. It was widely treated as a career defining turn for an actress who had spent years being reliably excellent in supporting and comedic roles without quite getting a showcase of that size.

That “Nasty” reunites the two of them so quickly is notable on its own. Directors and actors who strike that kind of creative chemistry do not always rush back to each other, especially once an awards run opens up a wider range of opportunities. The fact that Byrne and Bronstein chose to go again, and chose a project with a tone this dark and a dynamic this uncomfortable, suggests both of them see the earlier film’s success as proof of concept for a specific kind of collaboration rather than a one time alignment of a great script and a great performance.

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The film’s origins trace back to Isabella Jarosz, whose screenplay for “Nasty” landed on the 2024 Black List, the closely watched annual survey of the best unproduced screenplays circulating in Hollywood. Landing on the list has become one of the more reliable ways for an unknown writer to get noticed by producers and talent, and “Nasty” marks Jarosz’s first script sale, a significant milestone for any writer and a particularly notable one given the caliber of director and cast now attached to bring it to screen.

Getting a Black List script into production with this level of talent attached is not guaranteed even for a screenplay that generates buzz during awards season chatter. Plenty of scripts on the annual list circulate for years without ever reaching a soundstage. That “Nasty” moved from a name on a list to a fully cast, fully staffed production within roughly a year and a half says as much about the strength of the writing as it does about the appetite among Byrne, Bronstein, Ortega, and LuckyChap to take a chance on a first time feature writer.

 

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Ortega’s involvement goes beyond her performance. She is producing “Nasty” alongside LuckyChap, continuing a pattern of the “Wednesday” star taking on more creative control over her own projects rather than simply signing on as a hired lead. It is a natural next step for an actress who has spent the past several years building one of the more varied filmographies of her generation, moving between horror franchise work in “Scream” and “Scream VI,” studio comedy in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and prestige television with “Wednesday,” while also lining up literary adaptation work with Taika Waititi’s upcoming “Klara and the Sun.”

“Nasty” also marks a return to Warner Bros. for Ortega, a studio she has worked with before on “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which became one of her highest grossing films to date, and where she is also attached to J.J. Abrams’s next feature, “The Great Beyond,” now pushed to a fall 2027 release. Producing a project rather than simply starring in it gives Ortega a stake in how “Nasty” is shaped from the ground up, working directly alongside a director she has not collaborated with before and a first time screenwriter whose voice the entire project is built around protecting.

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“Nasty” is one of the earlier announced projects for Clockwork, the specialty label Warner Bros. launched this year to house exactly this kind of character driven, awards minded filmmaking. The label is run by a trio of former Neon executives, Christian Parkes, Jason Wald, and Spencer Collantes, drawing on their experience at a studio widely credited with turning smaller, riskier films into both critical hits and reliable box office performers.

Clockwork has moved quickly to build out a distinctive slate since launching. Alongside “Nasty,” the label has lined up “The Brigands of Rattlecreek,” a western directed by Park Chan-Wook starring Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal, and Tang Wei, as well as Sean Baker’s follow up to “Anora,” titled “Ti Amo!” The label has also struck a first look deal with producer Chris Ferguson and his studio Oddfellows. Taken together, the early slate reads like a deliberate attempt to position Clockwork as the place where filmmakers with strong, specific voices can make ambitious work inside the resources of a major studio, rather than having to choose between studio backing and creative control.

The Neon pedigree behind Clockwork’s leadership team is worth sitting with for a moment. Neon built its reputation over the past decade by backing films that major studios often passed on, then handling their marketing with a level of craft usually reserved for franchise tentpoles, a strategy that helped turn films like “Parasite” and “Anora” into both awards juggernauts and genuine box office successes well beyond what their budgets suggested was possible. Parkes, Wald, and Collantes bringing that same instinct into a Warner Bros. owned label suggests the studio is betting that the specialty distribution playbook that worked from outside the major studio system can be replicated with a major studio’s resources behind it, rather than treating prestige indie filmmaking as a category best left to smaller, independently financed outfits.

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Byrne is not short on upcoming work. She is set to star in the Peacock series “The Good Daughter” and recently earned a Tony nomination for her performance in a revival of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” alongside a filmography that already spans “Bridesmaids,” “Spy,” “Neighbors,” the Apple TV series “Physical” and “Platonic,” and Emmy nominated work on “Damages.” Bronstein, meanwhile, is developing an Apple TV series called “The Nanny Squatter,” and there had been some question over which project would reach screens first. Industry reporting around the announcement suggests “Nasty” is the more likely of the two to move quickly, given the fall production start now in place.

For Ortega, “Nasty” slots into an already dense release calendar. “Klara and the Sun” is expected to arrive this fall, “Wednesday” is heading into its third season, and “The Great Beyond” now carries a fall 2027 date after being delayed from its original release window. Adding a Warner Bros. Clockwork production to that lineup, with a planned 2027 theatrical release, keeps Ortega in position to have multiple high profile releases landing in relatively close succession.

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Production on “Nasty” is expected to begin this fall, which should bring further casting news, first look images, and likely a title change discussion given how blunt and provocative the current name is for a wide theatrical release. Clockwork has set a 2027 theatrical date, giving the project a fairly standard runway from production start to release for a film of this scale. Byrne and Bronstein’s history together suggests the wait is likely to be worth watching closely, and Ortega’s dual role as star and producer adds another layer of interest in how much creative input she ends up having over the final film once cameras actually start rolling.