Who is Ruby Rose? Actor cast as lesbian superhero Batwoman

Ruby Rose has been cast as Batwoman for a new small-screen adaptation.

She will play the “first openly gay superhero in a TV series”, which will connect with other DC Comics shows on America’s CW Network, including Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl, says The Guardian.

In the new show, due out next year, Batwoman’s real name is Kate Kane, described as a woman “armed with a passion for social justice and flair for speaking her mind”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The character is expected to first appear in a DC Comics crossover episode later this year.

The 32-year-old actor has described the role as a “childhood dream”.

“This is something I would have died to have seen on TV when I was a young member of the LGBT community who never felt represented on tv and felt alone and different. Thank you everyone. Thank you god,” she wrote to her 12.7 million fans on Instagram.

So who is Ruby Rose and where have you seen her before?

She’s a model, actor, singer and presenter

Rose first found fame in 2002 in The Girlfriend Model Search, an Australian modelling competition, and later presented MTV in her home country. She released a single called Guilty Pleasure in 2012 with London-born musician Gary Go. Orange is the New Black fans will recognise her as Litchfield inmate Stella Carlin, and she has also appeared in the films Pitch Perfect 3 and John Wick: Chapter 2.

She’s gender fluid

The actor describes herself as gender fluid. “For the most part, I definitely don’t identify as any gender,” she told Elle magazine in 2015. “I’m not a guy; I don’t really feel like a woman, but obviously I was born one. So, I’m somewhere in the middle, which – in my perfect imagination – is like having the best of both sexes.” In 2014, she released a short film about having an identity that “deviates from the status quo”.

She was engaged to Roald Dahl’s granddaughter

In 2014, Rose announced that she would marry Phoebe Dahl, a designer and granddaughter of the late children’s author Roald Dahl. However, they split up by the end of 2015 and Rose has since dated singer Jess Origliasso of The Veronicas.

She doesn’t know how many tattoos she has

In 2010, the model told InkedMag she didn’t actually know how many tattoos she had – but guessed at around 30. She has boxing gloves on her shoulder blade in honour of her godfather, boxer Lionel Rose, and Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on her right forearm.

She is a vegan

Rose, who stars in the upcoming shark horror film The Meg, recently revealed that it was shark fin soup that put her off eating animals. When she first discovered the soup contained real shark, she says: “I thought that it was even worse that they just cut the fins off and the sharks were out there not able to move. That really scared me and I used to have nightmares that they were finless in the ocean and I couldn’t eat any fish ever again.”