It’s been nearly five years since rumours began circulating that Ruby Rose was done with Hollywood and heading home to Australia. At the time, the Melbourne-born star was everywhere — from Orange Is the New Black to Pitch Perfect 3 — but her meteoric rise appeared to hit a screeching halt.
Following a controversial exit from Batwoman and emergency spinal surgery for stunt-related injuries, the narrative shifted and the industry’s fastest-rising star was suddenly framed as “blacklisted”.
But in a wide-ranging chat with PEDESTRIAN.TV, Ruby is setting the record straight. As she returns to screens in the SBS series The Hospital: In The Deep End, she’s finally ready to clear things up. No, she never actually moved back to Australia; no, she didn’t scrap her long-awaited tell-all memoir; and as it turns out, the Hollywood blacklist actually went both ways.
“The misinformation campaign around that was brilliant,” she remarked. “People thought I went back to Australia, people thought it was my fault, people thought I didn’t even get injured… My throat — and it’s happening now — but my throat will close up, and I can’t speak properly, because my body thinks it’s being attacked again.”
The truth about Ruby Rose’s Hollywood pause
While media outlets reported Ruby’s career pause as a “sabbatical”, she prefers to describe it as a time for “healing”. She admitted that her accident on the set of Batwoman and the subsequent fallout forced her to stand still, and gave her time to consider her career trajectory and what she wanted to do next.
“It kind of made me go, ‘Okay, what am I doing? What really matters to me? Am I even telling the stories that I dreamed of telling, or am I just running around with a gun, shooting bad guys now?’,” she said.
“At the beginning, I kind of really needed that. That might have been the most healing part of the job, because it was like little me getting to kind of go back and tell people what’s up. But after a while, it was just violence for the sake of violence, and it didn’t give me anything.”
Her decision to be more selective with her projects came around the same time she was offered a film role for $500,000 alongside “a very cancelled Hollywood actor”.
“It’s like, why would I ever want to do something like that?” she shared. “With those offers — and I’ve had a bunch in the last couple of years that have been rape scenes after rape scenes — it’s like, I don’t have any desire to be famous or in the spotlight or in Hollywood unless I’m doing what I feel like I was born to do. And I think I have a story that’s more interesting than any of the stories that I’ve played.”
Choosing her next projects
Ruby ultimately realised that doing a project in Hollywood that doesn’t align with her beliefs or her long-term goals simply isn’t of interest to her — but that doesn’t leave much to work with.
“I don’t know how long I’ll stay out here, because obviously I’m blacklisted from one network, but now I’ve blacklisted like, three of them, and there’s like, none left that I want to work with,” she admitted. “I’m not doing this political BS, and that would mean I’d essentially never be employed.”
This re-evaluation of her career led to her deciding that the only networks she wants to work with moving forward are PBS in the US, BBC in the UK and SBS in Australia — which is how she ended up on The Hospital.
“I’ve wanted to work with SBS for a long time, and I know that people say these things all the time, but I’d been talking to my team about wanting to reach out to them for a myriad of different projects that I wanted to approach them for,” she said.
“We hadn’t gotten there yet before we received a call saying that SBS had a sort of docuseries that they’d like to talk to me about, and I didn’t even really know what it was about at the time, and I was like, ‘I’m in! What is it?’.”
She then watched the first season of The Hospital, which offers viewers an inside look at the pressure points testing Australia’s health system, and instantly knew it was something she wanted to be a part of.
“This is the most magic show, because you’re showcasing the healthcare workers, you’re showcasing the patients and their resilience, and it was just that rollercoaster of emotions,” she said. “It was very inspiring and I felt fantastic after it. I felt so taken aback by the resilience in humans, and it’s good to see empathy is still alive and well in some parts of the world.”
What really happened with her memoir
As for her much-anticipated memoir, Ruby says she never abandoned the project — it’s just evolving. While the publishing side hit a speed bump, the story is finding a new medium.
“I had a fantastic agent… and then she left the agency and now does something completely different — which was odd for us at the end of last year. We were like, ‘Um, weren’t we just about to sell the book?’,” she detailed.
“But we have a bunch of interest in it, and I’ve picked it up as a documentary, so we’re going to do it documentary-style — which I’m hoping to do with SBS.”
The upcoming project is part of Ruby’s long-term goal to become a documentary filmmaker — a dream that was only intensified while filming The Hospital.
“When I got into acting, it was really because I wanted to tell stories, but I think I didn’t realise that I really wanted to tell my own story, and I just didn’t have the strength or the ability to do so yet,” she said.
“All I want to do, really, is documentary.”
The Hospital: In the Deep End season two airs Thursdays at 8:30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand.
The post Ruby Rose Has Finally Set The Record Straight On Quitting Hollywood & Being ‘Blacklisted’ appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
