Steak Tartare & Dating Woes With Delaney Rowe

Delaney Rowe knows what she likes. When we sit down for lunch at Corner Bar, we make less than two minutes of small talk before she poses the question, “Can I dom the menu?”

Rowe, 31, carries herself like she owns the restaurant, located in Lower Manhattan’s Nine Orchard hotel, and for good reason, as it’s one of the many hotels she’s been staying at while her apartment undergoes renovations after a flood. “I had some pretty fun, wild nights here the past three months,” she says. I acquiesce to her request; without hesitation, Rowe orders ocean trout carpaccio, delicata squash rings, bucatini pomodoro, and steak tartare. “Food’s a huge deal to me,” she explains.

Rowe and I are here to talk about Machine Learning, a new off-Broadway play directed by Colm Summers opening Oct. 20 in which she stars, but before we broach the topic, she speed-runs through a series of personal anecdotes related to her current home. She tells the story of a meet-cute she had while staying here involving a Londoner that she met at the elevator bank (“It was the rom-com of my dreams”) and reveals that she wore the same pair of Paloma Wool pants she’s wearing today, which come with a built-in skirt layered atop the gray trousers, on a nondate with her ex the night before. “I wore these pants thinking I nailed the outfit and that it was really cute, and he just goes, ‘I find them really confusing. I don’t know what I’m looking at,’” she says, aghast. The pants in question, she continues, were actually purchased yesterday, and her top, a sheer white button-down, was acquired this morning. (The flood and her subsequent hotel stays have stripped her of the luxury of clean clothes.) She’s also not drinking right now — a commitment she’s keeping through the end of the show’s run.

Written by Kate Vozella, Machine Learning follows two couples at a remote research facility who agree to be observed over an extended period to train humanoid companion robots about human intimacy. Rowe plays Georgia, a cold and unfeeling therapist who seems more interested in causing chaos within the group than helping the cause. It’s not a straightforward comedy, but the darkly comedic tone does follow in the lineage of the likes of Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf or The Invite. “It’s just heavy dialogue, no intermission, people talking about people things, which can sometimes be grating, but when done well [makes] a perfect play,” she says.

Known for her satirical sketches and painfully accurate cringe character work on social media, Rowe taking a turn as a theater actor may come as a surprise to some. In actuality, Machine Learning will see the former theater kid returning to her roots, as Rowe grew up performing in the Idaho Shakespeare Festival before majoring in acting at the University of Southern California. “It’s been interesting to jump back into theater and feel like everything that I learned when I was in college and high school is still there,” says Rowe. In recent years, the content creator has pivoted to film and TV sets — in 2027, she’ll star alongside Penn Badgley and Meghann Fahy in the Amazon MGM Studios rom-com You Deserve Each Other — but theater has always held a special place in her heart. “That [theater] culture that I was so nostalgic for… You finish your show, and you’ve got all your makeup on, and then you put your street clothes on. Then you walk out, and you get a drink with a friend, and you talk about the show or whatever. I just wanted that. It felt like a stark contrast to what I’ve been doing online,” she says.

Even with this contrast, she’s not worried about theater purists projecting a social-media scarlet letter onto her. “It’s not as though what I do on the Internet is personality-based, anecdotal, front-facing camera lifestyle things. I’m performing,” says Rowe. “People have come to know me as a performer on the Internet, as a writer, as a satirist. They already deem me as Delaney the character anyway, so that’s kind of a little hack, right? I’ve been able to escape a lot of the pitfalls that I think somebody who’s on the Internet exposing their personal daily life falls into.”

Offstage, Rowe is chipping away at her own writing projects, specifically two TV scripts and an upcoming book of essays. In classic writer fashion, the process of bringing pen to paper has been impossible. “I’m genuinely trying to do almost manosphere-style, mind over matter, like Atomic Habits James Clear, that level of force and diligence and… what’s the word I’m looking for that all these men use in their stupid books? Discipline. I have to manosphere-discipline myself into sitting down and writing because I do find it unbearable,” she says. But to Rowe, that’s the mark of a true writer: “By the way, I think it should be horrible to sit down and write. If you love it, you’re a bad writer. If you’re like, la, la, la, la, la, la, and enjoying yourself and indulging in that, you’re probably not great.”

Another thing keeping her busy outside of rehearsals: her roster. “I date constantly,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m looking for a mate.” At the very least, she’ll meet some new friends along the way. “I never believed [in being friends with your ex], but now as I get older, I’m like, ‘Why not?’ Unless it’s still fraught and infringing on your current thing that you got going on, keep it all graceful and kumbaya,” Rowe says.

Two hours and four shared plates later, it’s time for us to go our separate ways. On our way out, Rowe runs into her old friend Remi Wolf, with whom she went to college. Also being interviewed, Wolf pauses her conversation to invite Rowe to her concert at Webster Hall the following night. “I can’t; I have a show,” Rowe replies dejectedly, but that’s theater, baby. Add it to the long list of memorable experiences she’s had on the property grounds.

Photographs by Jillian Giandurco