“I wasn’t really a very successful child actor, thankfully,” says actress Ella Rubin.
Despite what the 24-year-old has to say about the fruitfulness of her childhood career, she was arguably the most prepared child actor a casting director could come across. Rubin had a calling card, of sorts, as a young performer. She’d show up to auditions with a metal briefcase in hand. Well, she clarifies, it was actually an art kit carrying case that had previously held watercolor paints.
But the then-11-year-old hopeful thought casting directors would understand just how serious she took this job if she showed up with this prop. “I really thought that they’d see me with a briefcase and think, ‘Oh shit, we’ve got a woman on our hands,’” she tells The Hollywood Reporter on a recent Zoom from her New York City apartment.
“At 11, I really thought that I was giving 30,” she says. “I dreamt of peacoats.”
Now, at 24, the actress is rightfully at the top of the call sheet with the Amazon-owned streamer’s latest coming-of-age series, Sterling Point. In the Megan Park-created series, Rubin plays Annie Jacobson, an overachieving New York City teen who finds herself inheriting her late grandfather’s Canadian island alongside her brother, played by Keen Ruffalo.
Rubin knew from the first read that Annie was a fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional character. That was in part due to collaboration between Park and Rubin. “Megan really prioritizes an actor’s wants and needs. Often it’s too scary to say it or voice it, and I think because we got to know each other so well in the process of collaborating, she often would know what I needed,” she says.
Ella Rubin as Annie Jacobson in ‘Sterling Point.’
Sabrina Lantos/Prime
Improv was encouraged by Park, a rarity for a show like Sterling Point. “I try to just create the safest space so that they feel really free, both creatively and personally, and that they feel like they have an actual voice,” Park confirms.
“It gave me the ability and trust in myself to gain the confidence to now, hopefully moving forward, voice my needs and opinions,” says Rubin. “It was something I was really afraid of before, and she gave me a whole new sort of outlook on that.”
The actress also had the ability to have more ownership over her character’s physical appearance. Park allowed Rubin and the other actors to do their own hair and left rumpled clothing for the sake of making it look realistic, but also to prevent the actors from being touched constantly, which, as Rubin points out, while normal, can lead to overstimulation and be stressful. “A lot of the things that [Park] brought to the series in the sense of a groundedness and it really allowed us as actors to feel like real people on set,” Rubin says.
For Rubin, having agency on set was welcomed as she points out that it’s sometimes complicated for young adults who are playing teenage characters. “Naturally and unintentionally, I think you can sometimes end up feeling a little bit infantilized,” the actress admits. But the Sterling Point set was very intentional about making sure the adults playing these characters felt like adults.
The jump from being a metal briefcase-welding 11-year-old to the lead of Sterling Point was not an overnight journey, but that persistence led Rubin into the right audition rooms, landing roles in The Girl From Planville and Gossip Girl on the television front. In film, she’s been seen in Anora and as Anne Hathaway’s daughter in the Prime Video original The Idea of You.
She credits an agent at her afterschool theater program showcase that helped push her into acting professionally. Rubin admits that she always had dreams of being an artist; she was leaning more towards visual art and painting, but never quite considered acting was a real career she could have.
The actress looks back fondly on her time as a young performer, but not uncritically. “Child acting can be really complex,” Rubin says. “It did give me a great gift as a child — I felt like a real person in the world and validated in so many ways.”
Ella Rubin as Annie Jacobson in ‘Sterling Point.’
Courtesy of Prime
Her parents were quite intentional about making sure that acting wasn’t Rubin’s only outlet as a tween and teen. She credits growing up in New York City with helping her understand the world. Even now, she notes that she has many friends who don’t work in the entertainment industry.
Rubin’s been auditioning for over a decade, but things started to get serious around the end of high school, later into her teen years. She started to work in a “more real way” and was hungry for it. The actress pushed through, as she tells it, six or seven years of rejection. She was never pained by it, though.
“I don’t know that I could have handled working more than I did when I was a kid,” Rubin says. “I always took it extremely seriously, but I don’t think I actually had any kind of skillset until I was a little bit older.”
She felt that she had the tenacity but not the ability to bring forth what she wanted to happen then. “It just took me a little bit of time. I was usually prepared enough and always really passionate, but I think when I turned 16 or 17, something clicked,” the actress says. Her big turning point was a Broadway play.
Rubin acted alongside Marisa Tomei in a revival of The Rose Tattoo. It was a bootcamp for the young actress. It taught her about preparation and work ethic.
“I had, to be truthful, no clue what I was doing,” she says. “I would love a chance to redo that because I really was flying by the seat of my pants.”
With Sterling Point and other projects, like the highly anticipated The God of the Woods, Rubin feels quite at peace with her life, it seems. But it’s more than just career success that’s led to her comfortability. “I don’t think it’s been in my adult life as hard for me as I might’ve expected it to be to separate myself and have a life outside of the industry and outside of my work,” she says. “I do know that it would only hurt my life, my career, my work to be one-track-minded about things.”
Rubin’s excited about what’s next, but she’s not letting it consume her. “Try not to put too much expectation on things,” the actress says.
She adds, “Maybe sounds pretentious, but I really do want to be present in my work and not think as much of what it’ll do for me afterwards.”
