Her honesty about her tortured childhood made Ruby Rose a household name – now she’s found her niche as Hollywood’s newest all-action heroine. Sanjiv Bhattacharya talks to the actress about her battle scars and marriage plans.
It’s all incense and jasmine tea for Ruby Rose today. In her cozy, supremely tidy Laurel Canyon pad, the actress parks on the sofa with her little rescue chihuahua, Chance, and sighs. “I haven’t had a day off in forever!” she laughs, her Melbourne accent good and strong. “It’s only when I slow down that I realize. I have pinch-me moments, like, ‘Is this my life?’ Because I’ve got four films coming out in 2017, and 18 months ago, I hadn’t even made one.”
Rose is best known as smart-talking Stella Carlin, the androgynous new inmate with the tattoos in Netflix smash Orange Is the New Black. Australians may remember her as a Vj on Mtv. But, this year, she is emerging as Hollywood’s go-to action heroine, in the Tank Girl mode. First in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the last installment of Milla Jovovich’s 15-year zombie franchise, then as Vin Diesel’s partner in crime in xXx: Return of Xander Cage, followed by John Wick: Chapter 2, co-starring Keanu Reeves, and a shark movie, Meg, with Jason Statham.
In person, Rose seems a tad spindly for an action star; more like a slight young boy of 15 with perfect skin and slim wrists. But she’s certainly active: she boxes, skates, surfs and rides motorcycles. She quite enjoys being thrown around a room and shooting big guns, she says, and, in true action-hero style, she’s proud of her battle scars. Like the time she ran into a metal pole on xXx and ended up with a “huge gash on my hip!” Or the time Keanu Reeves clocked her one: “It was just an elbow to the head,” she shrugs. “But he was mortified – it was so adorable.”
On xXx, she was so up for anything that when she turned 30, Vin Diesel threw her a party – at an axe-throwing club. Which is a thing in Toronto, apparently. “It’s like bowling with an axe; you have to hit a target in the wall,” she says. “It’s hard, but me and Vin are so competitive, we got pretty good.”
Rose’s gender-fluid style is one of the reasons she quickly became clickbait when Oitnb aired. When people call her ‘Sir’ by accident, and then apologize profusely, she laughs. “It’s the look I’m going for, so thumbs up,” she says. The irony of her feminine name isn’t lost on her: “All I wanted was a boy’s name growing up – Charlie, Billie, Max, Frankie. You just know my mum wanted a girly-girl princess!”
Instead, she got a rock chick who wears black jeans and band tees, with short, jet-black hair and well over 50 tattoos, including Jean- Michel Basquiat’s face, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, a unicorn and one of her dogs. Her knuckles read ‘Just’ and ‘Love’, because “why would you have hate?”
Her androgyny may be part of her appeal now, but it hasn’t been an easy path. Her story of humble beginnings, sexual confusion and bullying has a made-for-Hollywood quality (indeed, plans are afoot for a graphic novel). An only child, she grew up in the Australian boonies, raised by a single mother who fled an abusive husband. By the age of six, Rose knew she was different. “Everyone had Barbies; I had Ninja Turtles and Superman,” she says. “I was crazy about Archie comics. I played footie with the boys.”
Her friends were all male – girls made her nervous. And it was the girls who bullied her. At first it was because she was different, then at puberty, when she decided to “try the feminine thing” by wearing makeup and growing her hair, it was because they thought she was trying to steal their boyfriends – the result of still playing football with them. Then she came out as gay, and they bullied her for that, too: “‘First you want our boyfriends, now you want us’ – that kind of thing. I couldn’t win.”
In her frustration, Rose shaved her head, bound her chest and dressed as a boy again, hoping to be left alone. It’s a transformation she performed in her short film about gender-fluidity, Break Free, which went viral and won her the part in Oitnb, but at the time it didn’t work out so happily. She took a beating from a couple of boys that put her in hospital. “They didn’t see me as a woman,” she offers up as explanation.
It was around this time that she felt she had been born into the wrong body and longed to become a boy. Her heroes were all androgynous – David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Prince. But she doesn’t feel that way now. “I’m a woman,” she says. “I want to have babies one day, so I’m glad I didn’t make changes earlier in my life.”
But there are no immediate plans to procreate, despite her happy, co-habiting relationship with Jessica Origliasso of Australian band The Veronicas. When I ask if marriage is on the cards, Rose segues into civil rights. “I want to be the person I wished was around when I was growing up,” she says. A champion of the Lgbt community? “Actually, it’s Lgbtqi 2 Spirits +. The I is for Intersex and the 2 Spirits is for native people who believe that androgynous people have two spirits, male and female,” she clarifies. “It can be confusing; I have friends who are gender-neutral and like to be called ‘their’, even though you’re talking about one person. But if you’re going to be friends with them, just learn it – it’s not so hard.”
While they motivate her to speak up, her own personal struggles feel like a thing of the past for Rose. “My biggest challenge is to convince a network or studio head that I can play a Stepford wife,” she says. “So I have no challenges. I went from being underprivileged to being very privileged.”
Stepford isn’t on the cards yet, but she’s certainly getting variety in her roles: next up is musical comedy Pitch Perfect 3, with Anna Kendrick. There’s an electric guitar and a couple of ukuleles in her living room. “I can’t play electric yet, but I want to do it for real, you know?” And if she’s ever stuck for inspiration, she can call on her buddy Taylor Swift, who made her a little painting of a bike with the words, ‘Tryna catch me riding dirty’. Life is good.
Just one more thing: you never said whether you were going to get married. She laughs. “I don’t know. Can you imagine? Ruby Rose in a white floor-length gown and her Hells Angels tattoos?” I see you more in a suit. She lights up. “Exactly. Like Annie Lennox or Karl Lagerfeld. That’s me.”
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is out Jan 27
