MARTHA’S Vineyard, a playground for America’s oldest moneyed families, is as far from Litchfield Penitentiary as you can imagine.
At least, that’s what Australian actor Ruby Rose, thought a year ago as she sat binge-watching Orange Is The New Black in the comfortable surrounds of the Cape Cod island with the “very proper” family of her fiance Phoebe Dahl (author Roald’s granddaughter).
“Everyone kept saying after every couple of episodes, ‘God, Ruby, you’d be so good in this show,’ and I was like ‘that would be amazing’ but thought ‘it’s never going to happen.”
Even for a “scrappy” dreamer like Rose, it was the stuff of pure fantasy that within six months she would find herself auditioning for the hit drama, let alone win the role of inmate Stella Carlin in season three.
Just having a shot at joining the series was reason to celebrate, Rose told TV Guide, revealing she had whooped it up with her friends in Los Angeles.
“A couple of my close friends brought cake and flowers and balloons and we were just celebrating that I got to do this audition and how much that meant to me because I’d been in America for a while and just then, things were starting to really pick up.”
When she won the role, her response was necessarily different, sworn to secrecy by the production’s publicity machine and secreted away to the show’s New York set to begin filming.
She turned to “my new girlfriends, the cast of the show” who were in on her big break and welcomed the newbie with open arms.
Again, Rose’s first day wasn’t anything like she thought it would be either.
Picked up in a van not unlike the one featured in the opening scenes of season one — when Piper (played by Taylor Schilling) tries to make conversation with another prisoner Janae (Vicky Jeudy) — the former MTV Australia veejay gulped as she found herself seated by Jeudy.
“I had all these flashbacks and I was thinking ‘please don’t be a method actor’ and then she turned around and was like ‘heyyyy, you must be the new girl, this is so exciting and we’re all so excited to meet you. We’ve been Googling you and we can’t wait to work with you.’ It was the opposite of intimidating,” Rose said.
“What was great was that everyone was like ‘what are you doing later? Do you want to run through lines? Do you want to go out for dinner? Do you want to go do karaoke?”
If there’s one piece of advice Rose would give any actor joining the Orange crew it would be: “nobody in the world should ever do karaoke with the cast of Orange Is The New Black because they are all so incredibly skilled that’s it’s not actually fun. It’s like being at the blind auditions for The Voice. I had my name down for about five songs and then I was like ‘you know what? I’m taking my name off the table and I’m just going to watch the concert you guys are putting on.”
Top scoring singers included Danielle Brooks (who plays Tasha ‘Taystee’ Jefferson) and Laverne Cox (Sophia Burset) but it was Crazy Eyes, aka actor Uzo Aduba, who proved crazy good behind the microphone.
“She can do everything at some kind of criminally-talented level. As soon as I heard them all singing Alicia Keys and Whitney Houston I was just taking myself back to the projects.”
When she finally got around to the acting part of the job, Rose has found herself at the centre of a saucy love triangle storyline, a plot twist which came with a caveat from her real-life partner.
“She was like ‘whatever you’re doing, I’m proud of you and I support you … just don’t fall in love with anybody.”
ROSE IN BLOOM
IN her own words, Ruby Rose is “many moons” from where Australian audiences had seen her last before her career break in US drama series, Orange Is The New Black.
Open about her struggle with depression and bipolar disorder, she had signed off Twitter with a message of resignation and desperation, retreating to a US rehab clinic for medical support.
Now, she told TV Guide: “I’m very happy. I’m definitely feeling incredibly at peace with myself and the world and many moons from where I was many years ago. It’s awesome and if there’s anything I can say about that to people who have been through what I’ve been through ... which is a lot of people ... it’s just ‘hang in there because it does get better.’ That’s not a cheesy catchphrase that people try to use to save you when you’re not feeling great, it’s real. If you hang in there and it gets better, life is worth every single moment we get in this world. It’s all a blessing and I get to live that every day.”
FOXTEL WILL MARATHON SCREEN SEASON 3 OF ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK from 2PM FRIDAY on SHOWCASE. All 14 episodes will air back-to-back.
SEASON 3 starts again at 9AM on Saturday, June 13, followed by a weekly episode in OITNB’s regular timeslot on Sunday, June 14 at 7.30PM on SHOWCASE.
