For Ella Rubin, Sterling Point Was a Lesson in Letting Go

Spoilers ahead for season one of Sterling Point

Annie Jacobson was supposed to be from Tribeca. Then the apartment set for Sterling Point, Megan Park’s new Prime Video drama, ended up looking unmistakably like Brooklyn Heights, and the script changed to match. This meant that Ella Rubin, who plays Annie, had a problem. “I was like, ‘I have to reorient. This is not a Tribeca girl,’” Rubin told W on Zoom ahead of the series premiere. By the time cameras rolled, she’d worked out Annie’s whole backstory. “In my mind, she only moved there, like, two years ago.”

It’s the kind of adjustment only a New Yorker would think to make. Born and raised on the Upper West Side, the 24-year-old actor trained at the Professional Children’s School for working actors and dancers; she had steady gigs through childhood on The Girl From Plainville, the Gossip Girl reboot, The Idea of You (in which she plays Anne Hathaway’s daughter), and Oscar winner Anora. Then, Sterling Point handed Rubin her first lead role: a very specific type of New York teenager she understood right away.

“There are so many different pockets of New York City with different 17-, 18-year-olds, and Annie’s brand is somebody I’ve definitely met many times before,” she says. “There’s a certain toughness and groundedness [that she has], despite her bouts of entitlement.”

In the series—created by Park (whose Aubrey Plaza-starring feature My Old Ass similarly captured teen angst with care) and now streaming—Annie is an overly responsible high school junior with her sights set on the Ivy League and a high-powered career. She’s living in said Brooklyn Heights home with her twin brother (Keen Ruffalo) and their adoptive father (Jay Duplass) when a letter upends her summer. It turns out her estranged grandfather has died and left the twins his island, Sterling Point, on Canada’s Lake Muskoka.

With minimal parental supervision—and nursing the sting of a prestigious fellowship rejection—Annie travels to Sterling Point and discovers a younger sister she never knew she had, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), raised on the island by the grandfather Annie never met. It’s a classic summer teen drama, with love triangles complicated by sibling relationships and class differences, but its foundation is far more grounded than your typical teen fare. Annie, in particular, is a layered character facing complex identity issues.

Rubin and Park built that girl through what the actor describes as “really long, meandering conversations about who this person is, how she got there, and what it’s like to be parentified so much.” For Rubin, the trick to playing Annie was to capture the naive teen underneath the hyper-competence. “She has so many youthful, at times immature qualities that I wanted to balance with a girl who feels like an adult and doesn’t know how to be a kid,” she says. Rubin kept an Annie notebook—“our Annie Bible a little bit,” full of timelines and Venn diagrams—and credits Park’s hands-on process with giving her the freedom to stretch as an actor.

“Ella is one of those rare actors who is so achingly real and nuanced in what she brings to her characters and performances, it’s impossible not to feel something while watching her,” Park told W via e-mail. “I’ll never forget directing her in the ‘mom dream’ montage. She was essentially acting at the wall, picturing these moments past and future she won’t ever have with her mother without any actors there, and the deep work she had done before allowed her to deliver one of the most incredible performances I’d ever seen.”

Rubin worked with costume designer Marissa Schwartz to portray Annie’s journey of meeting a newfound gaggle of charming friends—and two competing love interests—through her wardrobe. When Annie arrives at the island, she’s in an all-white ensemble and lugging a suitcase full of expensive, business-casual pieces. Schwartz partnered with Chanel on Annie’s accessories while also working within Gen Z’s love of high-low dressing to incorporate pieces like a 1992 Calvin Klein dress and a cashmere Chloé sweater alongside Brandy Melville and Nike garments. As the season progresses, Annie starts wearing Ramona’s clothes, thrift finds, and loose, colorful Muskoka “cottage wear,” dressing for “the way that she wanted to feel, rather than the person she wanted to be perceived as,” Rubin says.

She also finds herself living in the present the way only an adolescent can (through a shrewd choice made by Park)—no cell service on the island. It’s a plot device that played out IRL for Rubin when her own phone broke mid-production, and she spent two weeks with a flip phone. “I'm so sorry to production, because they hated that,” she says. “But it was heaven.” She points to the Walkman that Park gave her as a wrap gift, adding, “I’m an analog girl.”

By the finale, Annie makes a series of choices that would’ve been unthinkable to the girl in the all-white ensemble who first arrived at her family’s cabin—including the one she makes between her slow-burn island crush Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) and her familiar childhood friend from the city, Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye). “Over the course of the summer, we watch her go from someone who’s incredibly uncomfortable with the unknown to someone who chooses the unknown,” Rubin says. The one thing that doesn’t change, even as she decides whether to return home to Brooklyn for her senior year or not, is the New Yorker in her. “She sticks to her guns,” Rubin says.

The season ends on a cliffhanger, which Rubin would love to see resolved. “Obviously we left the show in a precarious place, but I do think the end is the perfect encapsulation of Annie and Ramona’s love for one another, and the love of a sister,” Rubin says. “They make a decision that’s sad for each of them and better for each of them.”

Rubin is currently back in New York shooting Netflix drama The God of the Woods—“which I haven't done in so many years, and which is amazing,” she says. She’s still carrying Annie’s transformation with her. “Doing Sterling Point gave me a new sense of valuing fun for the first time. Similar to Annie—that’s where we cross over. I didn’t understand how much fun I was denying myself.” Whatever comes next, she says, “I would love to find a greater sense of playfulness.”