Ella Rubin: she played Vera in Anora, then she ran the show

Ella Rubin

Photo: DonScottNYC / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 2, 2001 New York City, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Anora, The Idea of You, Until Dawn

Something that inclines people in the entertainment industry toward managing other people’s talent, rather than pursuing their own, is that they can see what the real thing looks like up close. Perri Kipperman has been working as a talent manager long enough to recognize it. The irony is that being raised inside that recognition — which could have smoothed every door for Ella Rubin — produced an actress who kept choosing the doors that led somewhere harder.

The first thing most people will tell you about Rubin is that she makes supporting roles hard to forget. The second is that she played Vera in Sean Baker‘s Anora — the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes 2024, the most structurally ambitious American film of the year. She played Ani’s sister and roommate in a film that was, from beginning to end, entirely about someone else. She was unforgettable.

She grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the Professional Children’s School gave her the framework to take theater seriously without surrendering what passed for a normal adolescence. Her mother Perri Kipperman is a talent manager; her aunt Jodi Kipperman runs a casting agency. The family business, in every sense. Rubin first appeared on screen at twelve, in The Rewrite, the Hugh Grant romantic comedy, playing Etta Carpenter, a student. It did not, to anyone’s knowledge, change her life.

At seventeen, she made her Broadway debut in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, playing Rosa — not a peripheral character but the play’s turbulent emotional center. The theater work established a seriousness of purpose that her television years would test in different directions.

Between 2021 and 2023 she moved through prestige television in recurring configurations: Dafna in Netflix‘s academic satire The Chair, Bianca Breer across six episodes of the HBO Max Gossip Girl reboot, Natalie Gibson in the Hulu limited series The Girl from Plainville. These were not starring roles. They were, if anything, the opposite — an unhurried accumulation of craft inside stories that belonged to other people.

The first real change came with The Sweet East (2023), Sean Price Williams’s debut feature that premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Rubin played Annabel, one of a rotating cast of characters who encounter the film’s protagonist during an odyssey across contemporary America. The film was strange, critically admired, and nobody’s idea of a career pivot toward anything recognizable.

Then came 2024. The Idea of You, which arrived on Amazon Prime Video opposite Anne Hathaway, gave Rubin her first broadly visible supporting role — she played Hathaway’s daughter Izzy — but the film that actually changed the conversation about her was Baker’s Palme d’Or winner. Anora is a film in which nearly everyone is, in some sense, peripheral to the protagonist. Rubin understood that and played the marginality with an understated precision that critics found impossible to ignore.

What complicates any reading of Rubin’s career as pure self-determination is the infrastructure around it. Having a talent manager for a mother and a casting director for an aunt — in one of the most access-dependent industries in the world — is not a neutral starting position. Hollywood’s conversations about who gets opportunities, and who is protected from consequences when those opportunities don’t materialize, have grown more specific and more uncomfortable since at least 2021. Rubin has not addressed it directly. What she has done is consistently choose projects that work against the insider-track logic: indie circuit, Palme d’Or supporting, back-to-back horror leads.

That horror double bill — Until Dawn (2025) and Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025, Netflix) — looked at first like a genre pivot but might better be understood as a leading-actress audition. In Until Dawn she carried the film as Clover Paul; in Fear Street: Prom Queen she played Melissa McKendrick. Two consecutive leads in productions designed to test whether she could hold a screen for ninety minutes. She held it.

Sterling Point, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video on August 5, 2026, makes the case for Rubin as an actress capable of carrying a series. She plays Annie Jacobson, whose inherited island in Canada becomes the site of buried family secrets and new attachments. The show was renewed for a second season weeks after its premiere. That same month, she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to preview the series. She has also begun a formal relationship with Louis Vuitton, walking the runway for the brand’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection in May.

In May 2026, Deadline reported she had joined The God of the Woods, Netflix’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s bestselling novel, as Louise Donnadieu — a working-class camp counselor whose life is upended when a young camper goes missing. The cast alongside her includes Kerry Condon and Maya Hawke. It is a different kind of project from anything she has attempted: literary-adapted, prestige television, with co-leads who operate at an entirely different altitude.

That choice is, in its way, the clearest signal yet of what kind of actress Ella Rubin has decided to become — one who keeps selecting the room where the bar is highest, on the apparently correct theory that eventually the bar stops being the problem.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Anne Hathaway, Sean Baker, Anora, Ella Rubin, Sterling Point, The Idea of You, Until Dawn

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