Five years ago a meme crudely titled “lesbians who look like Justin Bieber” had its brief moment on the Internet. The conceit was simple: photos of women and girls, probably many lesbians among them, with short hair and a little blessing in the bone-structure department, who really did bear a striking resemblance to the boy singer.
Among them was the Australian actress and model Ruby Rose, whose 3D-printed cheekbones complement one of the best short-hair games in the biz. Walking in Los Angeles last year with a 50s greaser-inspired haircut, and a fade so fresh even the Biebs would look twice, she was followed by a coterie of schoolgirls, whispering, “Is it Justin? Is it him?”
For now, she is unknown enough to be mistaken for the sweetest face in pop. But not for long. In June, Rose will make her U.S. television debut on Netflix's Bechdel-test-smashing hit Orange Is the New Black. She will play Stella Carlin, an Australian inmate living through her very own episode of Locked Up Abroad. She will also comprise one corner of a love triangle involving Piper and Alex.
Stella’s appearance in the trailer was one second long—a wink—but it had her existing fans swooning, and new ones searching for her name. This Season 3 promotional flyer quoted a random Twitter user, who may have spoken for the whole Internet when she said, “This new Stella chick . . . she looks pretty hot.”
I can confirm that, in person, Ruby Rose is indeed “pretty hot,” as she opens the door to the SoHo hotel room Vanity Fair booked for this shoot. She’s wearing a prohibitively spiky leather jacket (Viktor Luna), matching studded sneaker-boots (Saint Laurent), and her hair has changed to a Spock-ish bowl cut that requires a heroic effort to pull off.
“Physically and mannerisms-wise, we’re very similar,” says Rose, taking a seat at the hotel dining table and folding her skinny hands over her elbows. Tattoos on her knuckles spell out J-U-S-T L-O-V-E.
“Stella’s very androgynous and comfortable in her skin,” she continues. “But I have insecurities, and I get shy, nervous. Whereas Stella doesn't really give a f*ck.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
To channel Stella’s swag, Rose drew on a “flirty” confidence she used to fake around childhood crushes. She came out when she was 12 and was obsessed with Mariah Carey. (“I was pretty certain we were going to end up together,” she says.) Born in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1986, her early years were spent in small-town poverty, as she and her mother, a rebellious 20-year-old named Katia Langenheim, went on the run from Rose’s abusive father. When they arrived to stay at Rose’s aunt’s, a thousand miles away, “She had two black eyes and I was super malnourished. I just looked like one of those dirty little scary kids in scary movies that bite people.”
For a while they lived on baked beans and mashed potatoes, on sofas and in caravans in people’s backyards, and shared a bedroom at her grandmother’s.
Langenheim hates it when Rose tells this story, by the way.
“She's like, ‘I read again that you said we were poor!’” Rose laughs. “I think she sees it as some kind of failure. I’m like, ‘You don’t understand; it’s the opposite. It doesn’t have anything to do with your parenting or anything.’ If anything, I want that to, like, inspire other people. I’m saying we didn’t have much, and we made a lot of out of it.”
Langenheim worked her way through a degree and set them up in housing through the church. Rose sang in the choir. Life was stable, but in high school Rose became the target of a vicious group of teenagers. In person, she talks fast and is sweet to the point of nervousness. She is brutally humble, a little bit dorky, and quite vulnerable—all charming traits on an adult, but the kind that would put any high schooler in grave peril.
She was also starting to realize just how different she was to other girls. She used to love how her hair looked when she got out of the shower, dark with a little curl at the front, like Superman. She bound her chest with bandages, literally praying she would never develop boobs. When she was 15 she shaved her head in an effort to look more masculine, and suddenly found herself “in really dangerous situations,” she told me in an interview last year for The Guardian. “If I talked back, a few times I got hit by guys. But they’d say, ‘I would never hit a girl, but you're not a girl.’”
