Long Live Ella Rubin

Ella Rubin could eat but isn’t sure it’s a good idea. “I try to remind myself to not eat during an interview because I feel like it all goes to sh*t and ends up [in my hair],” she says, grabbing a fistful of curls for effect. Don’t worry, I assure her, I’m also notorious for that. “Oh good, then we’re in this together,” she says, and suggests an order of tabbouleh.

It’s the kind of hair that walks into a room first (in this case, the East Village staple Cafe Mogador), got an entire Vogue video tutorial, and — along with a positively star-making turn as Annie Jacobson in the teen drama Sterling Point — helped make Rubin Hollywood’s newest It Girl. It’s also the kind of hair that you can’t fully appreciate until you’re past the very teenage years Rubin has made a name for herself portraying.

“People are being very nice about my hair, which I’m so flattered about. But I’m also like, ‘They don’t know the turmoil,’” she says — the turmoil being middle-school-aged boys who had nothing nice to say back in the day. “The funny thing is I knew I should embrace it, and I knew it was silly not to. And yet it’s just so hard to not [want to be] completely homogenous at that age.” She breaks out her phone to show me a picture of her mother and aunts, all four of them bursting with curls. “It’s so amazing to look like your grandma and your aunts.”

Rubin, 25, is a fantastic lunch date. She has a knack for turning the mundane into the philosophical. Take her on a tangent on the reality show Vanderpump Rules by way of example: “Does it not sometimes feel to you so dark that it is almost unbearable?” she asks. “It’s a show about misogyny and cheating. The worst thing a woman can be is annoying, and the worst thing a man can be is a murderer.” It’s the kind of insight that also makes her an even more compelling performer.

Rubin has been acting — and pontificating about acting, she says — since childhood, booking recurring roles in her teens on shows like The Chair and, later, the Gossip Girl reboot. Then she was onto film with notable family-member-of roles in The Idea of You (as Anne Hathaway’s daughter) and Anora (as Mikey Madison’s sister). With this year’s undeniable Sterling Point, however, she’s leading an ensemble in a role that — somehow, in a single season — has already joined the likes of Marissa Cooper and Serena van der Woodsen in the pantheon of teen-soap greats. What’s different about her character, Annie, from the aforementioned icons? You probably actually know someone like her — or are like her.

In August alone, she gained over 680,000 Instagram followers. Days after the show premiered on Prime Video, she was first chair on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In one 48-hour span, she was the splashiest name at Chanel’s big Coco Mademoiselle fragrance launch party and a guest of Ralph Lauren at the US Open. “Someone asked me the other day, ‘Was there a moment you realized what the show was becoming?’ And I almost feel like I blacked out a little bit there,” she says. “It was about maybe a week after it premiered that it started to feel crazy. Since it was original IP, there was nobody waiting at the starting point. We opened the door and kind of chilled, and then suddenly people started flooding in... And it is just, for lack of a better word, really f*cking cool.”

One thing Rubin is used to is being told who she looks like: She’s Anne Hathaway mixed with Rachel Weisz, with a dash of Julia Roberts and a hint of Emmy Rossum, depending on the day, or whom you ask. She recently got a new one: Hayley Williams. “I know everyone says I look like everyone, but I had never gotten her until yesterday,” she says. “And I am, like I am with everybody else, beyond flattered and so excited about this. What a performer!”

Excited and flattered as she may be, there’s no question that Rubin is also singularly herself in many ways. She still cuts her own hair. She gets extremely anxious choosing the music to play while getting glam. As a child, she kept a notebook she called her “anthropology journal,” in which she dramatized her parents’ lives and which included a comically off-base suspicion that her mother was taking steroids because she was suddenly working out a lot. And she’s a hot dog nepo baby. Seriously.

“Nathan of Nathan’s Hot Dogs is my great-great-uncle,” she says proudly. “I’m a nepo hot dog heiress. Except there was no money. I feel like it’s very on brand for me to be a hot dog descendant.”

“Teenage girls run culture. There are very few things more powerful than a teenage girl.”

The comparison Rubin understands the most is the one with her Sterling Point character, Annie Jacobson. “It seems like people do find an incredible amount of similarities between us, which I get because, purposefully, from a creative standpoint, we chose to keep a lot of my cadence, physicality, the way I joke,” she says. “The pillars of who we are at our core, the defining traits, are extremely different, but the way we literally act is the same. So I think it totally makes sense because I appear as her. But people who know her don’t necessarily know me. We are really different.”

Her co-star Amélie Hoeferle, who plays Sterling Point’s Ramona, agrees. “One big distinction is that Ella — and please don’t kill me, Ella, when you read this, I mean it with true admiration — really embraces the process of something, and if that process includes a mess, she will embrace the mess,” she writes in an email. “Ella is also spontaneous, admirably so. She doesn’t plan nearly as much as Annie does. In fact, I don’t think Ella owns an ID — I’ve only ever seen her passport, falling apart at the seams, when we go out.”

In crafting the nuances of the character alongside show creator Megan Park, Rubin turned to what she calls her prized possessions: her teenage journals. “It really helped to get back into the teenage mind because even though I’m not that much older now, at the same time, I feel like I’m a million years older,” she says. “So much happens between these ages, and when you’re a teenager, you’re so deeply steeped in that psyche. And then the second it’s over, it’s hard to peer back inside in an intimate way. I knew I wanted to have a record of my teenage brain. I don’t read them often, but sometimes if I need a little bit of inspiration or something calls to me to read them, I’ll tap back in.”

“I sometimes go into this tunnel vision where I forget I’m living an actual life, too.”

I ask whether she watches herself on screen — the digital version, perhaps, of reading back your own journals. “It really depends on the thing and how much I think it’ll destroy me mentally,” she says. “I also want to foster a good relationship with myself ... You know that quote ‘Wherever you go, there you are’? I always found that to be an incredibly nightmarish idea. People talk about it like it’s this wonderful thing, and when I think about it, it feels incredibly claustrophobic and terrifying to me. But I think something that I’m afraid of is life unexamined. I never want insecurity to make me hide from myself in some larger way.”

Sterling Point is part of that. “I love Annie deeply,” she says. “She feels like this person who is a figment of my imagination or a friend somehow, like a person I know who doesn’t exist. She’s omnipresent almost. And so, I’m flattered by the comparison because I deeply care about that character.”

She cares so deeply, in fact, that she’s terrified to return for Season 2. “I think during the first season while we were filming, we all knew that we were kind of in the good times,” she says. Now comes the pressure of expectation. “If and when she does make a bad decision, I’ll maybe be a little bit more scared for people to be mad at her. But at the same time, that’s part of the beauty of the show: that it’s all really flawed characters. And in the first season, none of us were afraid of allowing them to be multifaceted, even in the negative sense. I’m going to continue that energy in Season 2.”

Critical acclaim on its own is no small thing (Season 1 currently holds a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes), but Sterling Point has also passed the ultimate vibe check: Actual teenage girls watch the show. “I mean, there’s nothing more fulfilling than a 13-year-old girl telling you that she really liked your performance,” Rubin says. She recently got the feedback straight from the source: In the upcoming television show The God of the Woods, Rubin plays a camp counselor to a cohort of teenage girls. While filming, the other actors used their filming downtime to catch up on the series — and tease their fearless leader about her multiple on-screen love interests (and kissing scenes). “I’m like, ‘Girls, you’re about to lose your Sterling Point privileges. No more watching Sterling Point.’” she says. “Teenage girls run culture and sort of define the response to these kinds of shows. And for them to be liking it, it’s an incredible honor. It really is. I think there are very few things more powerful than a teenage girl.”

“Something that I’m afraid of is life unexamined. I never want insecurity to make me hide from myself.”

Before she played one on TV, Rubin was a teenage girl obsessed with being a teenage girl. “I’ve always been really invested in art and movies, and I think you watch stuff like, ‘Oh my God, being a teenager is this huge thing. It’s this major moment,’” she says. “It felt like I was on a tightrope walking towards the rest of my life ... I was existentially aware of the nature of time, which is something that I think both is cool and robbed me of presence a lot.” That’s when she started keeping the journals that would later inform much of her portrayal of Annie. “I did have an understanding that once teenagehood was over, it would be hard to viscerally remember.”

Which is exactly what makes it such a hallowed time period, she reasons. “Teenage girlhood is nuclear,” Rubin says. “It is an unreplicable experience. It is a certain time, it is a certain mode, it is deeply traumatic and really wonderful and really scary and really intense and super awesome. I’m endlessly fascinated by women in general, but the mind of the teenage girl is endlessly interesting and compelling. It’s an honor to represent this community that I’m actually now no longer a part of. It’s interesting because of its inevitability: You will graduate from it.”

Still, while Sterling Point may be a show about teenagers, it’s not a show just for teenagers. Ask your coworkers, your mom, your neighbors – the show is a bona fide intergenerational hit. “We all have things that get uncovered for us that rock our foundations, that make us have to reassess who we are as people,” she says. “It’s funny, a lot of women past their 20s have said to me, ‘Oh, I love the show. I know it’s not my demographic.’ I actually completely disagree. I think it is for, genuinely, everybody of every age. Teenagehood is just an amazing avenue to explore [certain] topics because it is such a potent emotional time in your life.”

As our leisurely lunch stretches past the two-hour mark, Rubin is keen to keep talking. The only thing left on her to-do list for today is to pick up balloons for a surprise dinner she’s throwing for her mom that night. She recently was on the other end of such festivities: On Sept. 2, she turned 25 and was surprised with a party in an East Village dive not far from where we’re sitting. “And I am really hard to surprise,” she says.

Perhaps she’s just been engulfed in work. Outside of Sterling Point’s press run, the majority of her day-to-day has been relatively off the grid: long days filming The God of the Woods upstate in the Adirondack Mountains and the Hudson Valley. “I always feel extremely grounded by work and extremely my best self when I’m deeply focused,” she says. “Although, my friends and family might say otherwise because I sometimes go into this tunnel vision where I forget I’m living an actual life, too. I’m trying to do that less these days.”

The God of the Woods is an adaptation of Liz Moore’s 2024 bestselling novel of the same name, about a child who goes missing at a summer camp that shares land with a wealthy family estate. “It’s pretty f*cked up,” Rubin says. Her character, Louise, the camp counselor, “has an allure, and she’s a complex person,” she adds. “That is one thing I’m taking really seriously: wanting to honor who she is in the book. There’s a lot of darkness and intense themes, and I just really wanted to get it right.”

In addition to being a thriller, it’s also something of a period piece: The adaptation is set primarily in 1975, months after the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and at 23, Louise sits right at the precipice of feminism. “She is sort of the embodiment of an era of shifting womanhood,” Rubin says. “Womanhood’s always something that’s shifting, but it was a real fever pitch of feminism, of making the choice about who you are as a woman.” Playing someone close to her age was nice for a change as well. “It’s been an interesting experience not having to shape-shift physically a little bit,” she says. “Another character I just played is 26. I’m amping up things that make me look physically mature, which my experience 100% of the time has been taking the physical elements of myself that feel the most youthful and amping those up.”

“Looking back, I was truly an odd duck as a kid. And now, I wish I let my freak flag fly more.”

Acting opposite so many child actors reminded her of her own working-actor youth. “It’s such a trip,” she says. “I remember so clearly moments of yearning to be one of the adult actors and finding it so cool and so mystical. I couldn’t believe that I could just get endless trail mix at crafty. It blew my mind. Now I’m a candy girl, but as a kid I was a trail mix girl, which does say a lot. I was like, ‘I need fuel for my performance as Girl No. 2 at the party.’ To be an adult now with the kids, it feels like just a second ago that the roles were reversed.”

Another realization? “I was really lucky in my child acting in that I wasn’t a very successful child actor.” Her parents had set some boundaries: She could audition, and she could maybe miss a few days here or there for a commercial shoot, but she wasn’t giving up school for acting, and she certainly wasn’t moving across the country for a job. The result? Being 25 and well-adjusted enough to act, well, 25.

“I feel very much my age, but also I’m every day absolutely shocked and rocked by the fact that I am not 7,” she says. “My mom was turning 41 when she had me. She had such this whole life before I came into the picture. And I’m like, ‘Man, life really is long,’ because she’ll be talking about something from her 20s, and she barely remembers it. Something that was clearly this huge event, or anxiety-inducing or dramatic or amazing or whatever. And it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, huh, I guess that happened.’ A lot of things come out in the wash, which is scary and beautiful.”

On this side of Sterling Point’s success Rubin is contending with the privilege of choice. “It’s a pinch-me moment,” she says. “I was in a meningitis commercial when I was young, and I think I cried from happiness when I got the part, which is as valid as anything, and we love science. Lately I’ve been thinking back to my child self, imagining what she would say at the idea that I am reading things, and in a genuine way, discussing what would be best: What’s the move, what’s smart to do, what do I want to do?”

Turns out that answer doesn’t need much philosophizing. “Looking back, I was truly an odd duck, I think, as a kid. And now, I wish I let my freak flag fly more,” she says. “As an adult, I’m always trying to find my way back into an artistic space where I can feel my most 5 year-old weird kid. I’m sure we all have that.”

Top image credit: Fendi clothing; Adidas shoes.