Ruby Rose Is Ready to Stand in Her Own Power, Save Gotham, and Get the Girl
“I don’t have my master's in being gay,” Ruby Rose says from the makeup chair, sinking into a fluffy white robe. “I mean, I might now, but I didn’t then.”
We’re at Milk Studios in Hollywood, where Rose, 33, is being photographed for her Glamour cover—she’s one of three trailblazing women on TV being featured on our TV Issue—and talking about how much has changed since she got her start in the early 2000s in her native Australia.
“I was always Ruby Rose, the lesbian MTV VJ, the lesbian model, the lesbian actor,” she explains. “I was like, That's not a part of my job. That's not on my business card. I didn't study to do that, did I?”
Rose may reject those labels, but this fall she’ll play the first out leading lesbian superhero on TV in the CW’s Batwoman. This comes after a string of action films, including The Meg, John Wick: Chapter 2, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. She has also played a sexy rocker in Pitch Perfect 3 and a sexy felon in Orange Is the New Black. And though it shouldn’t be, doing all of this—the action movies, the superhero show, the a cappella franchise—as an out lesbian is groundbreaking. It means she’s quietly queering narratives that have historically been reserved for heterosexuals.
When she arrived at the shoot, she looked like a paparazzi photograph of a celebrity at LAX brought to life—complete with an oversized denim jacket, a matching drop-crotch pants, and a designer hat and sneakers. The thing is, she really did just come from LAX, en route from Vancouver, where she’s currently shooting Batwoman. When we talked, we flanked the body of a makeup artist; sometimes she maintained eye contact with just one eye while her makeup artist dusted the other—a level of muscle control I found both admirable and chilling. It felt as if we were in the eye of a storm, a hurricane of L.A. characters whirring around us.
At the center of it all was Rose—calm, cool, and collected as gales of pandemonium whirled around her. She remained the consummate professional, even somehow finding the energy to humor me in a conversation about celesbians. (That is, lesbians who are also celebri…you get it.)
Rose’s career launched in 2002, when she came in second place in an Australian modeling competition. After the win, she worked at odd jobs, saving money for acting school in order to give performing a real shot.
But her first major introduction to public life came in 2007, when she became a VJ for the country’s TRL. It was a time when tabloid culture was burgeoning and public queerness was still being exploited and sexualized. (See: some publications that reported on Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson’s kissing, “stunning” hetero couples.) And yes, a time when the word celesbian was booming. Rose doesn’t mourn the era.
“It started great,” says Rose of being a household name back home. “Australia was when I really got a good taste of what it's like to be in the papers every day. [But] people get sick of you. You're in the daily newspaper getting a coffee, and people are like, ‘She's such an attention seeker, getting her coffee!’” Even a photo shoot for a men’s magazine cover was touted as setting a lesbian precedent. “When that all was happening, I was getting frustrated at always having to have my sexuality be a part of it, like, you’d never say, ‘the heterosexual DJ.’ That’s bizarre,” she says. “But I realized that if I had to deal with that being really annoying for 10 years, then maybe someone else wouldn't have to.”
Rose cites the EW roundtable she participated in this summer with Melissa Etheridge and Anderson Cooper, both public figures who have lived to see the culture change and endured near whiplash in doing so, as an example of perseverance. “They've paved the way for me to do what I do, and I'll pave the way for other people coming through.” Now, with Batwoman, Rose gets to stand in her own power, save Gotham City, and get the girl.
Outside of playing a vigilante on camera and hanging out with Taylor Swift, her life sounds relatively low-key. She says she likes to spend time outdoors, kayaking, hiking, and boating. She meditates and reads. She’s vegan.
But the role of Kate Kane, Batwoman’s alter ego and the cousin of Batman’s Bruce Wayne, is not without its parallels to Rose’s own life. “We have similar stories in that we both came out really young, both never really hid it, both paid sort of different but similar prices to doing that,” she says of the character. “It was never a question for me of whether I would or wouldn’t be honest [about my sexuality]. I just kinda said it, when I said it around 11 or 12, and that’s sort of the same story with Kate.”
That said, identifying with Kate isn’t necessarily Rose’s favorite part of playing the role. “Her being gay, it’s definitely part of who she is, and it's definitely part of the story and establishing why she's not in the military anymore. But the show is not about a gay superhero. It’s about a superhero.”
Rose says she and Caroline Dries, executive producer of the show, have spoken at length about how to position Kane’s queerness in Batwoman. “We both make the show and love this show because it's what we wished we had on television when we were kids,” she says. And so Rose hopes it will open people’s minds and present female queerness as normalized, rather than tokenized.
She says the Batwoman supersuit, designed by Academy Award–winning costumer Colleen Atwood, makes her feel bulletproof. “The costume is awesome,” she says. “Putting it on for the first time was very, very surreal. I talked to everyone else, like Melissa [Benoist of Supergirl], Grant [Gustin of The Flash], Stephen [Amell of Arrow], about their first times, and it’s just really peculiar because she’s made it to your body. It’s my suit.” One issue: “If we were to do a season two, my only thing is going to be, ‘I gotta find a way to pee, guys.’” While we cackle about demanding bathroom-accessible supersuits being on the front lines of the fight for equality, she quips, “All the boys get a zip! They all get a zip, and none of the girls do. That’s not right!”
Batwoman isn’t the first time Rose has played a queer heartthrob, of course. When she appeared as Stella Carlin on season three of Orange Is the New Black, she seemingly gayed every woman in America. Many, many fans tweeted about “questioning their sexuality” after streaming the season. “My friends were like, ‘What is happening?’ It was a wild ride,” Rose says.
But that moment was something Rose considers “the most pivotal” in her career. Her veteran Orange castmates told her, “You do realize this is going to change your life, right?” And they were right: Orange opened up new doors for Rose stateside. She credits Orange creator Jenji Kohan and casting director Jennifer Euston for getting her “a job, a SAG award,” and “back-to-back movies” that allowed her to acquire a visa.
But as the old superhero saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Rose’s being the heartbeat of queer female storytelling also means she’s been susceptible to criticism, both from within the LGBTQ community and outside. I ask if she feels the weight of this—publicly representing LGBTQ people—on her shoulders.
“I wouldn’t even begin to try, and I wouldn’t know how,” she says. “It's never really occurred to me that there would be a way to make everyone in the world happy. I’m aware that some people will like me and some won’t. That’s just life.”
That same sentiment applies to Batwoman, her highest-profile leading role. “Some people will love the show, some people might be surprised and find that they really enjoy it, and some people might not see themselves on the screen and therefore not see the point. But there's obviously plenty of shows for people like that. There’s plenty of shows for white old men.”
Rose’s casting as the superhero wasn’t without controversy—a #RecastBatwoman hashtag even trended on Twitter. The critics stated that Kane, a lesbian woman with Jewish heritage, should be played by a woman who identifies with her sexuality and her religion. Though Rose has long been out, they argued, she is not Jewish and has identified as gender fluid in the past, thus negating her ability to play a woman who loves women. Some just didn’t think she had the acting skills necessary for a leading role. “I didn’t think people would care so much that I was cast,” she tells me of the backlash. “But on my deathbed, I’m not going to be like, ‘I really wish that more people, more strangers on the internet that I didn't know, liked me.’”
As for the future, Rose wants to find roles that challenge her in new ways. She wants to try comedy. And she wants more projects that shoot close to Australia, because she gets homesick. I learn family—chosen and inherited—is important to her. “She’ll travel across the world to surprise you on your birthday,” says Vin Diesel of his xXx: Return of Xander Cage costar. He describes Rose, like all the most important people in his life, as “family.” When we speak on the phone, I can hear his children clamoring in the background, asking to speak to her, misunderstanding who was on the phone. Now, he says, he’ll have to FaceTime her after our call.
Also in Rose’s future: rejecting the notion that she has to be anything for anybody. Rose is not the lesbian actor or the lesbian Glamour cover girl, but her presence in Hollywood does mean something. Taking up space in stories that aren’t necessarily groundbreaking is, in itself, groundbreaking. And the more that happens, the more queer women will reap the benefits. Rose certainly has.
A moment that still sticks with her: Angelina Jolie was once named the “celebrity that most men and women want to sleep with.” Rose remembers Jolie being asked why she thought both men and women had voted for her. “She said some throwaway comment like, ‘Probably because I'm most likely to sleep with my female fans,’ or something like that. I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Even if I'm the only gay person I know right now, if there's other ones out there and any of them look anything like this…I'm gonna have some fun.'”
“She just made it seem really no big deal,” Rose explains. “It was those little things that made me realize that it was no big deal. And the moment you start acting like it's not a big deal, people stop treating it like it is.”
Hair: Riawna Capri; makeup: Beau Nelson; manicure: Vanessa McCullough.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
