Breakout
Brief chats with people who are doing things that thrill them.
Photo: Javier Castán
When Ella Rubin was 5 years old, she had her first existential crisis. “My oldest cousin took me to the natural-history museum and we were in a projection room zooming through the cosmos,” the 24-year-old actress says, tucking one of her loose curls behind her ear. “There was this wise female voice-over and she said, ‘Someday, the Earth won’t exist. But that’s in millions of years from now when we’ll all be gone.’ My stomach dropped so hard.”
Almost exactly 20 years later, the New York native is nowhere near as fearful about the end of the world as she was back in kindergarten, but she hasn’t completely let go of her hang-ups. Sitting in the back patio of Lucali, the cozy Cobble Hill pizza joint known for its long lines, simple menu, and celebrity clientele, Rubin takes a look at the margherita pizza we ordered and points out the big chunks of basil dotting the surface. “Can we eat basil?” she asks, and before I can whip out my phone to check if the herb is safe from the current cyclospora-parasite outbreak, she decides against taking that gamble and carefully picks off the greens before folding her pizza and taking a bite.
The character she plays on Sterling Point, Prime Video’s newest addition to its slate of young-adult series, isn’t much of a risk-taker either. But Rubin brings a softened maturity and natural curiosity to Annie Jacobson, the straitlaced, Brooklyn-bred overachiever. The series, from writer-director Megan Park, follows Annie and her twin brother, Connor (played by an affable Keen Ruffalo), after they discover they have inherited an island in Canada from their estranged grandfather. Their single father (Jay Duplass) brushes it all off, which sends Annie on a journey of self-discovery. When she arrives at the island, called Sterling Point, she uncovers the truth about her deceased adoptive mom and finds out about the younger sister (Amélie Hoeferle) she never knew she had.
Photo: Javier Castán
“Annie feels that she doesn’t have the right to be sad about missing someone she never really knew,” Rubin tells me, leaning forward onto the table between us. “She uses perfection and drive to fill a mysterious hole, but there’s a real messiness to her that I didn’t want to shy away from just because she’s someone who is, on paper, really put together.”
Like Annie, Rubin has spent her whole life in the city. “It’s kind of the only place I truly know how to live,” she says matter-of-factly. Raised on the Upper West Side, she was scouted by an acting agent during an after-school theater-class production of Seussical the Musical. Her best friend, Mia, had urged her to join. “On day one, the teacher was really intense and crazy. We’re 10 years old and he’s bringing children to tears talking to us about the seriousness of what we were doing,” Rubin remembers. “I look over at Mia and she’s crying, whispering, ‘I don’t want to be here.’ And I remember thinking, Oh shit, I really do.”
She remembers school being tough and suggests that her habit of daydreaming might have deterred her from the kind of academic success her character achieves on Sterling Point. But Rubin put all her serious energy into acting, which she says immediately felt fulfilling. After class, she would go from audition to audition, always carrying a metal briefcase to seem more mature and stand out. Her first film role, in The Rewrite, put her on the same set as Marisa Tomei and Hugh Grant. By the time she was a senior in high school, she’d made her Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo.
Photo: Javier Castán
Her dedication earned her parts on series like the irreverent comedy Difficult People and The Chair, on which she played an eager-beaver college student enamored with her professor, also played by Duplass. He became her mentor. “I was so young and I wanted to be a writer, but I was kind of scared to admit it to anybody,” Rubin says. “One day, we were waiting to do a scene, and he looked at me and he just said, ‘You’re a writer. Why don’t you send me your stuff?’”
After she landed a part on the true-crime miniseries The Girl From Plainville and a spot on the Gossip Girl reboot, Rubin’s career really started to accelerate. She appeared in Sean Baker’s Anora; Fear Street: Prom Queen, the second installment of the Netflix slasher trilogy based on R.L. Stine’s books; and The Idea of You, playing Anne Hathaway’s boy-band-obsessed daughter. Hathaway, or “Mother,” as Rubin calls her, gave her a “master class” on set: “She taught me a lot about how shrinking yourself or overapologizing causes you to suffer not only personally but creatively, and I’ve tried to take that lesson with me to every set since.”
By the time Sterling Point came around, Rubin was more prepared to let herself tap into her inner child and feel everything without shame. She laments the way young adults think of themselves now, the way smartphones and social media have made us too self-conscious to display vulnerability. “People think it’s embarrassing to really want something right now,” she says. “Death to nonchalance. What’s the point? Why are we pretending? And why is it not cool to try or to desire? When we watched movies growing up, people made grand gestures and made fools of themselves. I want to see yearners onscreen.”
When Park was casting the part of Annie, she was looking for someone who could play a put-together go-getter but still nail the comedic timing required of the role. “When I saw Ella’s audition tape, she was flawless. But I was like, Wow, this is also somebody I want to see unravel a little bit,” says Park. “Ella is definitely very neurotic and type-A and hard on herself, but I think she is trying to break free of that a little bit. It was really fun to watch her explore that and loosen up as Annie does by the end of the show.”
Photo: Javier Castán
Though Sterling Point is the first series created by Park, her reputation as a filmmaker who knows how to write a teenage girl with blinding accuracy precedes her. Rubin was a fan of Park’s first two features, The Fallout and My Old Ass. “Whether or not you’re similar to her characters, there’s a level of understanding you feel with them because they’re real people,” Rubin says. The series was shot in Ontario last summer between Toronto and Muskoka, and Rubin remembers Park telling the actors they should just play as if they were at summer camp. “Ella is so funny, and she brought this layer of comedy to Annie we weren’t expecting,” Park says. “I kept being like, ‘You’re giving young Sandra Bullock to me.’” Rubin remembers she would sometimes almost black out during filming, unable to remember what she said or did, only to rewatch it later and think to herself, I didn’t know I could make that face. “The fact that she cast me taking a risk really gave me a level of faith in myself that allowed me feel really free in the role,” Rubin says. “And feeling confident in playing Annie allowed me to let go of everything.”
At Lucali, the 2026 World Cup final broadcast has just ended (Rubin didn’t watch but did tune in for the historic Knicks run a few weeks earlier), and as luck would have it, American royalty have just tried to sneak out past us. When Rubin’s eyes catch sight of Beyoncé walking out with Jay-Z, she doesn’t say anything. Instead, we both hold our breath. It’s not until after they drive off in their black SUV that we giggle and hold up our cans of beer to offer a cheers “to a classic New York night.” Later, after finishing our drinks, loudly yapping about astrology, and deciding if we should hit up Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain for dessert, Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet slink into the patio and sit at the table next to us. There’s no way we can leave now. “Oh my God,” Rubin mouths to me as their backs are turned. A few minutes pass before they get up and go inside. “Oh no, did we ruin their date?” she wonders, letting out another laugh at the absurdity of the night.
Yesterday, Rubin had just watched the season finale of Sterling Point on FaceTime with Hoeferle, who plays Ramona, Annie’s independent, unruly younger sister. “We’ve been too scared to watch it because it’s the rip-your-heart-out, cut-you-open, classic Megan Park–style moment where she just destroys your whole soul,” Rubin says. “We were joking last night about how we accidentally went slightly Method. But we were so invested in our characters that it just happened naturally.”
Photo: Javier Castán
Playing the older sister was easy for Rubin even though she’s the younger of two in her family. “To put sisters onscreen is such a smart way to show love,” she says. “I’m so glad I’m talking to someone with a sister,” she continues, “because there’s something about it you can’t explain.” She tells me one of the season’s final gut-wrenching moments between Annie and Ramona was improvised. “Every time I had an emotional scene regarding sisterhood, my sister was at the front of my mind,” Rubin says. “Just thinking about the fact that I could have such a vicious fight with someone and also love her so much I would jump in front of a bus for her with no questions asked.”
In addition to strengthening her real-life sibling relationship, Sterling Point taught Rubin she had the chops for comedy, which she would love to do again. She’s also interested in roles that are physically challenging, like those of an athlete or a dancer. One of her favorite movies is Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, which is exactly the type of project she’d want to work on one day. She tears up thinking about her best friend, Mia. “To love a woman as a best friend, there is literally nothing else like it on the planet. It’s so pure. It’s so deep,” Rubin says. “There’s so many movies about female friendship and the real grief of that. When we get a little bit older and move to different places and they’re no longer your first call, what is that like? The pain of that. It’s pretty sickening.”
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