Photography by Alexander Morgan Styling by Jensen Edmondson Written by Carrie Wittmer
Editor-in-Chief: Faith Xue Creative Direction: Ella O’Keeffe Hair: Xavier Velasquez using Virtue Makeup: Shayna Goldberg using Chanel Beauty Styling Assistant: Ana Cecilia Mesquita Photo Assistant: Chase Elliott Photo Assistant: Roshan Jacob Digi Tech: Heins Evander Production Company: Other Half Executive Creative Producer: Cara Scott Production Coordinator: Maddie Galer
Executive Editor: Jordan Rossman Social Strategy Lead: Kala Herh Social Creative Lead: Natasha Sheridan Senior Design Director: Victoria Parrotta
Digital Designer: Julia Mendelsohn
“Maybe this sounds insane and a little bit obnoxious, but I remember my first existential crisis, and I was five years old,” Ella Rubin says.
It was the day of her grandfather's funeral. Her parents didn’t want her to attend, so her cousin took her to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, where they watched a movie about the universe. “We're zooming through the cosmos, and an omniscient voice goes, ‘Someday we won't exist. Someday the earth won't exist. In millions of years from now, we're all gone.’” After the movie, she got a stretch penny. “I was holding it so tight in my hand, I remember the mark it left,” she recalls. “I was extremely worried about the fact that I was a child, and that I might be wasting time.”
This might explain why Rubin recalls spending most of her teenage years “desperate to be older and to feel like an adult.” When asked which teen dramas she grew up watching, she names The O.C.—a show that came out when she was a toddler.
Rubin, 24, grew up on New York City’s Upper West Side and fell into acting almost by accident; she accompanied her best friend to an audition for a children’s theater group when she was 11, auditioned herself, and landed the lead. A few years later, she made her film debut opposite Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei in The Rewrite at just 13 years old. “It was this amazing reprieve because I felt like I got to be understood as an adult, or a little fake adult in some regard,” she says.
The Sterling Point star on teenage girlhood, unraveling onscreen, and those Anne Hathaway comparisons.
Ella Rubin Takes The Lead
"My greatest fear is doing anything one dimensional."
In Amazon Prime’s recently debuted show Sterling Point, created by Megan Park, Rubin plays Annie Jacobson, a tightly wound, Type A 18-year-old who visits a remote island she’s recently inherited to learn more about her mother, who died when she was young. “It surprised me that she wasn’t already the most famous person in the world,” Park says, when asked about bringing Rubin onto the project. “She is able to access emotion, and keep it grounded and real each take, over and over again.” This groundedness remains steady throughout as Annie, a focused Brooklyn Heights girl thrust into a place in which groceries are only accessible by boat, stays at Sterling Point and uncovers family secrets—the more she unravels and, as Rubin later puts it, the more Annie “becomes a kid.”
For all their similarities, Rubin and Annie aren't exactly alike. “I'm driven and a Virgo, so we share certain qualities,” Rubin says. “But at the end of the day, I like to go with the flow.” What she recognized more deeply was Annie's relationship to growing up. “We're really similar in the sense that, as teenagers, we both wanted to grow up too quickly and choose to be adults prematurely.”
It became a through line in Rubin's performance. For Rubin, that meant letting Annie be more raw than her exterior might suggest. “[Megan Park] actually encouraged me to prepare a little bit less and just to kind of feel it,” Rubin says. As Annie slowly loosens her grip, Rubin wanted to capture the feeling of regret towards the end of your teenagehood.
“It’s kind of an ominous feeling,” she says, “being nostalgic for a time that hasn't really even ended yet.”
I finished Sterling Point last night and I had so much fun. I'm not a particularly sensitive person, but by the finale, I was just fully crying.
Honestly, that means a lot. And that's something Megan [Park] and I talk so much about because she's not really a crier. And we were like, "We're going to make the non-criers cry." So that's very good to hear.
How are you feeling now that Sterling Point is out and getting positive reception?
It's pretty wild. The ultimate dream when you're filming something is that one person will connect with it. And in my case, in particular with Annie, the hope is that somebody would feel some kind of connection and feel understood by her in some form. To have that on this larger level is more than a dream come true. I kind of can't believe it. To have lived with the character for so long, and now everybody knows her and understands her… it’s pretty insane.
A lot of people online are comparing you to Anne Hathaway. How do you feel about that?
Extremely flattered, of course. I was just telling her that I'm talking about her a lot on this press tour. Truly, it is the most flattering thing to hear about yourself, and so I will absolutely take it forever. What were you feeling when you first read the pilot?
It's as painful and emotive as it is funny and romantic. That's just something that I really never want to shy away from.
The characters in Sterling Point feel so authentic and honest. They feel true to it being 2026, but also, the show could take place in the '70s and the characters would make sense.
That's one of the greatest compliments I've received about the show so far. I think teenagers are kind of eternal in a way. There's a spirit to teenagehood. And in particular, teenage girlhood—that is kind of evergreen.
What's the first thing about Annie that made you connect with her?
As I started to play Annie, she became really goofy. I think because she's really type A and very straight-laced, very driven, very intense and neurotic, it would seem that she wouldn't be as messy or as clumsy emotionally and physically, but [her character] was written in a three-dimensional way, and to get to feel free enough to add on to it was really amazing. I'm quite Type B, but I feel like I can come off a little bit Type A. I actually wish I was. I have no clue how to be. I just have my shit together at work and pretty much nowhere else.
The other thing that struck me was that she's been really parentified, and she's always taken care of people her whole life and never really gotten to be the kid. And, over the course of the show, she becomes a kid, and she allows herself to unravel and learn how to be the one who's taken care of.
What’s so unique about Annie is that she's cool and emotional in a way that you rarely see a Type A woman depicted in media.
Right. In real life, people aren't prescribed personalities and then stay perfectly on that track for their whole lives. With rigid people like that in particular, there's almost like a rubber band effect where things start to spill out of the sides when you're white knuckling.
The goofiness and the messiness [of Annie] wasn’t a conscious thing. It just felt incredibly natural and right. Part of that is a testament to the way that Megan [Park] allows her actors a lot of agency, and we can really try things and find it and put pieces of ourselves into it. Once I got halfway through the shoot, I realized that my greatest fear is doing anything one-dimensional. And luckily I was surrounded by people who created a show that made three-dimensionality really effortless.
Megan was an actor before she started directing. Do you feel like that makes a difference being directed by someone who was an actor?
Absolutely. She really understands the small, day-to-day difficulties in being an actor that can sometimes impede your performance. She wanted us to feel comfortable in our bodies and the way that we looked. She wanted to keep the makeup really natural. She let us do our own hair. We could go to the bathroom by ourselves, and she trusts us to leave set and get a snack and come back, which sounds really silly, but at times you're not always afforded that level of trust.
This show made me want to go to a lake immediately.
Yes. Lakes are kind of underrated. It was so beautiful to be there, and to be at work in the middle of one of the most gorgeous places you've ever been is pretty fantastic. It was beautiful. Looking back, I'm like, Was that a dream? Was it as good as I remember it? And it really was. It was incredible. Sometimes after work, we would all just jump in a lake. It was like summer camp.
There are a lot of scenes of characters on boats.
You know what? It was my favorite part of the shoot.
You did look very happy on the boat.
Yes. I'm so glad you're calling that out. I've wanted to talk about the boats more. From the second we started the boat training, because we all had to get our boat licenses and get trained, I felt incredibly in my element for some reason, miraculously. I strangely really took a liking to it. I got to do all my stunts myself, the spinny thing [from episode one] they somehow allowed me to do. And Bo [Bragason, Rubin’s co-star], thank God for her, trusted me not to kill us.
It kind of feels like your journey from New York to the lake mirrors Annie's journey.
Yes, certainly. Even being a New York City kid—which I really loved and felt really grateful for—I always felt like someone who belonged in nature or needed that in my life more. And so it was reflective in that sense. Getting to be in nature for a whole summer, I couldn't have imagined anything better. I'm shooting [God Of The Woods] upstate right now and I'm getting to be in nature a lot. In between takes, people are like, “All right, you can go back to your trailer.” And I'm like, “I'm just going to lay down right here if that's okay.”
Even though Annie and Amélie Elisabeth Hoeferle’s character Ramona are half siblings who just met, their chemistry and dynamic as sisters feels so authentic and real so quickly. How did you build that?
It was just incredibly natural. [Elisabeth] and I had an immediate connection and a sisterhood between us. I felt it the second that we met at the chemistry read, honestly.
I loved how Annie always has agency in both of her romantic relationships and it never blows up in the way that you might expect it to.
Yeah, it kind of subverts the love triangle of it all. Because there are two boys and a girl, and both of them are kind, eligible bachelors who care about her. Neither of them are cruel. Neither of them are violent towards each other. And Annie doesn't handle it perfectly. She doesn't know how to have a crush, let alone be crushed on by two people. It's not so much this explosive decision. It reflects real life. It's kind of awkward. It sort of peters out in a strange, awkward, uncomfortable, refreshing way. And she's making a decision, sure, but it's also perfectly indicative of the way she's letting life lead her for the first time ever.
Even the way Annie loses her virginity feels authentic to the way most people do. It's pretty mundane for most people. It's not this whole thing.
It mirrored the reality of a lot of experiences like that, especially because we really, really thought a lot about that scene and how to make it authentic, fun to watch, and completely consensual. But she is drunk, which is what allows her to feel uninhibited enough to make this decision. And she does really like Rory, but she's confused. It’s the kind of scene that’s sort of a paradox in a lot of ways.
And we got a Lana Del Rey needle drop.
That was all Megan. That was her vision of the scene before she wrote the scene. Music was a massive way that I prepared for the role.
What music were you listening to?
My playlist was partially what Annie would listen to, partially what I listen to get into Annie, partially just what's inspirational for certain scenes or the series as a whole. Funny enough, I think Annie has sort of a strange music taste. I do think she listens to a lot of podcasts. I don't know if she's listening to a ton of music. I strangely think she loves kind of an emotional ballad. I think she kind of likes Alone by Heart. Weirdly, I also decided just accidentally that Annie is a little bit of a pop-punk 2000s girl. She’s [definitely listening to] Olivia Rodrigo. I think My Own Worst Enemy by Lit is a good one. Probably Lorde.
It makes sense. What is your favorite look that Annie wore in the season?
The last episode, the sweater with the rain boots. Marissa Schwartz was our costume designer. We really wanted to make sure that there was a clear progression with Annie, that her clothes reflected where she was at mentally. And also emotionally, she really does go from that Chanel dress to the boots and the sweater.
Has a character's wardrobe ever influenced how you dress?
For sure. I always sort of accidentally start method dressing a little bit. And then once the show is over, I zoom out and remember what I like to wear. I heard someone say the other day that you should never shop while you're playing a character because you'll end up with clothes that once you re-find yourself, you would never wear. But Annie and I share certain style sensibilities towards the end of the show, especially.
What were you watching?
I watch a lot of reality TV while I'm deep in a role. As Annie, I took the plunge into Real Housewives of New York, which I had never done. I watched the entire thing. Because sometimes when I got home from an intense day of work, I was thinking about the next day. And then to turn on to watch somebody act, it would make me be quick to admonish myself and my performance, and I'd get too in my head. Real Housewives of New York, I almost... we became one. I was too deep in it. I actually had to take a break. It was taking over my brain. These women, I mean, it's almost inspirational, their ability to be free and insane with no holds barred. You've truly never seen anything like it. At the [Sterling Point] premiere, we watched the first and second episode, and I didn't realize that I may have accidentally been inspired by Luann [de Lesseps] going, "How could you do this to me question mark." Because I do a voice note to Connor and I'm like, "Question mark, question mark, question mark." I was like, "Wait, did I steal that from Luann?" So insane how it just bleeds into everything.
What are some films, shows, or performances that are really inspiring to you as an actor?
Oh my God. I just haven't been asked this yet. Gena Rowlands in Opening Night is one of my favorite performances of all time. Anytime I watch her, I just feel a newfound sense of appreciation for life. And I love Catherine O'Hara in Best In Show. One of the best. When her knee wobbles, I don't know how she did that.
Cookie Fleck forever. The fact that her name is Cookie Fleck is enough to do it for me to begin with. I mean, every single actor in that movie, but she's just truly, truly a great inspiration to me. Anne Hathaway in Ella Enchanted is to me always amazing. And then Parminder Nagra in Bend It Like Beckham. Incredible. And then everybody in Drop Dead Gorgeous and The Princess Bride.
Is there someone—a director or actor—you would hope to work with one day?
So many. I would love to work with Pedro Almodovar in a dream, dream, dream world. It sounds insane to be saying that, but we're going to put it out there. I think Janicza Bravo is amazing, and I'm obsessed with anything Christopher Guest. So if he makes another movie, I'll do anything.
Can you tease anything about your character in God Of The Woods?
It's totally new for me to be playing [someone] who's troubled in this gritty, confusing way. She's really weird and complex, and it's an amazing experience to be able to play somebody who I am really very different from. Everybody in the cast [Maya Hawke, Kerry Condon, Tracy Letts] is absolutely brilliant.
What's something you've watched recently that you enjoyed?
I watched The Invite recently. Rocked my world.
What's something that you're secretly really obsessive about?
A while ago it was photography, and I’m wanting to get back into that because it was the creative love of mine. I grew up really loving going to photography galleries and I’m obsessed with Nan Goldin. As a teenager, I got into photography, film photography, and I'm hoping to find my way back because it is a really cool art form and the patience it requires is a beautiful practice these days.
What's something you've become less self-conscious about as you've gotten older?
Being misperceived. That's not to say that I don't still have a really hard time with it, because I do. But I used to be really insecure that people found me not chill in some way, and now I don’t give a fuck. I'm feeling the frontal lobe cooking. It's insane, like I thought everyone was making it up. I'm 25 in a month. I got one more month to go.
VERSACE BRA, PANTS, BELT, AND CARDIGAN
GUCCI DRESS
PRADA DRESS
BEVZA BODYSUIT, ALMADA SHORTS, TOM FORD SHOES, STELLA MCCARTNEY BAG, SANTANGELO NECKLACe
GUCCI DRESS
ISABEL MARANT TOP, MISS CLARE SULLIVAN SKIRT, STYLISTS OWN TIGHTS, ISABEL MARANT NECKLACE, ARAKS BRA
“I used to be really insecure that people found me not chill in some way, and now I don’t give a fuck.”
“I used to be really insecure that people found me not chill in some way, and now I don’t give a fuck.”
BALENCIAGA JACKET AND PANTS
VERSACE BRA, PANTS, BELT, SHOES, AND CARDIGAN
BEVZA BODYSUIT, SANTANGELO NECKLACE. MAKEUP: CHANEL LES 9 OMBRES EYESHADOW PALETTE - THE NEW SMOKY; ROUGE COCO STAIN LIPSTICK - FLYING CLOUD. HAIR: VIRTUE HEALING GLOSS