Ruby Rose: ‘I was trying to fake being fine with the attention’
Ruby Rose rocketed to international fame during the past 10 years in America, but is now happier at home in Australia as she doesn’t have the “emotional bandwidth and energy to withstand another year of living in the States”.
Stellar
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When Ruby Rose moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago in pursuit of furthering her acting career, she had reached a certain conclusion: her fellow Australians, she believed, were getting tired of her. To be fair, Rose was ubiquitous. She appeared on radio and starred in TV series, had a successful side hustle as a model, popped up at gigs as a DJ and had also launched her own clothing brand.
But when she got to the US and started to find work – most notably with a breakthrough role in Netflix’s global hit series Orange Is The New Black, and starring roles in blockbuster movie franchises such as Resident Evil, John Wick and Pitch Perfect – Rose began to better appreciate the professional foundation she had laid back home.
“There is a hard working reputation that’s been built by Australians and New Zealanders and it has given us a very wonderful reputation as far as when we go to work,” she tells Stellar. “Aside from the one job that would like to say something else about me, my experience on set has been people saying, ‘We knew you would be a hard worker because you’re Aussie.’ It makes you so proud.”
About that “one job”. In 2019, when she was starring as the title character in the TV series Batwoman, Rose injured her back while performing a stunt, nearly severing her spinal cord and ultimately being rushed into emergency surgery. The injury, along with her subsequent recovery, ground things to a halt. So, too, did the controversy that ensued after it was announced that Rose wouldn’t return for the second season of the show.
In response, Rose took to Instagram, where she alleged serious on-set abuse and cited unsafe and hostile conditions as the reasons she had left. The show’s production company, Warner Bros., quickly counteracted those claims, saying they terminated their working relationship with Rose following multiple complaints about her behaviour in the workplace.
“Being told you could be paralysed and then not going outside during the media storm of it all, my confidence was shot. I was completely broken,” she recalls. “I had given so much to my career for so long and it was definitely going in this one direction. And then everything stopped and it kind of fell apart a little bit. It was a really crazy time.”
Her recovery was then compounded by the isolation brought on by the pandemic, which left Rose wishing the world didn’t have to reopen. And when it finally did, she tells Stellar, she seriously considered giving up on her career and moving to a farm.
“For a long time I was trying to fake being fine with the attention or the limelight or the labels. But I’m a hugely sensitive person and I’m not actually designed for this [career],” she says.
But Rose has spent her life pushing herself out of her comfort zone, and with help from breathwork, therapy and a round of acting classes, she started to find her confidence again. “I know that when I did my first ever audition, I felt like throwing up and was insanely nervous. But you do them so much that now I don’t feel like that anymore. I like the idea that every time I do something outside my comfort zone, it stretches my limiting self-belief a little further and then I gain a little bit of real confidence,” she says.
“This feels like a success in itself because I know the battle I’ve fought to even get here.
“I don’t think I’m at a healthy level yet but it’s so much better than what it was three years ago. At one point it actually makes me kind of sad to think of how much I lost, but now I feel embodied in a way that I really never have been in my life.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still hurdles. Earlier this year, and again on Instagram,
Rose announced that she was writing a memoir, one that would detail, among other things, the toxic relationship she had with ex-partner Jess Origliasso of The Veronicas. Rose told her 22 million followers that writing about the Brisbane-born siblings and singing duo was her first priority, signalling her intent by saying she was “excited to tell the truth. On the sisters? You’re first.”
Rose explains to Stellar that she announced the book in such a public way to keep herself accountable to write it, however she now admits the way she did it “was a terrible idea. That wasn’t a wise or healthy or happy thing to do. I was doing too much. I was trying to write the book as well as doing a very serious film and it was so heavy,” she recalls, adding that she’s pressed pause on the memoir for now. “But I still strongly feel that I have to write this book and it has to come out soon. I feel like maybe it’ll be very healing for me.”
Rose has also found some solace in returning home to Australia, where she’s both bemused by the little things (“I’m in awe of how technologically savvy everyone is. I was trying to get a script for medication and they sent me a QR code and I could pick it up at any chemist. No-one in the United States is doing that,” she says with a laugh) and determined to get back to work.
In fact, Rose says, she had been manifesting new jobs when she was approached with an opportunity to star with Daniel MacPherson and Gemma Ward in an intense four-week season of 2:22 A Ghost Story at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre. Aside from a high-school performance in Oliver Twist, it’s Rose’s first big stage role. The thriller, which premiered in the UK in 2021, has been nominated for three prestigious Laurence Olivier Awards and centres around a couple who believe their house is haunted.
“It’s going to be a bit rough for me the first couple of days because I get so anxious,” Rose admits. “I really do get such bad stage fright. I can pass out. I get such a visceral response. But I do think it’s worth giving it a shot. What’s the worst that can happen? It does make everything seem possible when you come up against these sorts of things.”
Aside from landing the role, Rose says she plans to spend more time in Australia given the draining and tense nature of the current political climate in the US. “I don’t know that I have the emotional bandwidth and energy to withstand another year of living in the States with that anger and that oppression and what they’re doing to the gay community and the trans community – it has become so exhausting,” says Rose, who came out as a lesbian at the age of 12 and has since championed conversations around gender fluidity through projects such as her 2014 short film Break Free. “I’ll never stop fighting but I do feel sad because it seems like it’s going backwards. I still can’t fathom why we care what somebody else does in their time, on their body, in their clothing, in their identity and [with] who they love.”
Rose has two new action films – Dirty Angels alongside Eva Green, and The Collective with Don Johnson – due out later this year. But after that? “I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do next and this is probably the first time I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll do the West End or Broadway or maybe I’ll go to college,” she says. “I think that’s one of the most powerful places to be in life. Nothing is forever, and nothing has to be definite. As long as I keep finding projects that bring me a lot of joy, then I’ll keep doing it.”
For more details of 2:22 A Ghost Story, visit 222aghoststory.com
Originally published as Ruby Rose: ‘I was trying to fake being fine with the attention’
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