Arkansas Online

TRACEE ELLIS ROSS

The Emmy-nominated Black-ish actress and activist is still a curious child at heart. “It’s what turns me on about life,” she says.

BY MARA REINSTEIN

In an alternate universe, Tracee Ellis Ross would have been an excellent meteorologist. “I’m checking the weather right now,” she says breathlessly from her New York City hotel room. It’s a busy Friday morning, and she’s T minus 60 minutes from jumping in a car and then jetting home to L.A. to spend time with her family. That is, if the forecast cooperates. “Right now it’s 46 degrees and drizzling but as the day progresses, the temperature is going to drop in an insane way. I’m looking at the wind speeds too. We better get talking!”

The reality, of course, is that Ross shines as an award-winning actress, producer, entrepreneur, model and social activist and advocate. Travel chaos aside, she’s eager to sound off on all the above.

“I’ve always loved telling stories,” she says. “It’s about connection and humanity and finding the differences that make our world so robust and textured and beautiful. I’m also one of those people who loves going to dinner by myself and asking people, ‘Who are you?’ I’m still that curious kid at heart.

It’s what turns me on about life.”

Ross, 50, puts these talents to use as the executive producer of the new Dear Media-produced podcast anthology, I Am America. Each of the weekly ten episodes spotlights a person of color who overcame the odds to become an unconventional success story and represent, in her words, “culture, belonging and community.” Storytellers include activist architect Deanna Van Buren (who designs spaces for peacekeeping), content producer and Initiate Justice co-founder Richie Reseda and comunity leader Kier Gaines.

Ross, who spent more than a year with her team developing I Am America, provides the introductions and closing statements. She’s so passionate about the output that she reads a passage aloud directly from her Google document during the interview. “I’m just providing the framework and creating context,” she explains. “It was really important for me that these stories were not told through my voice. I’m just supporting these angels of America

and allowing them to have their own narrative.”

OVER HER RAINBOW

Of course, no one expected Ross to stay home and stare at her trophies after wrapping her run as Dr. Rainbow “Bow” Johnson on Black-ish in 2021. (The awards are displayed on a bookshelf in her home office, by the way.) “It’s not really about what I wanted to do or didn’t want to do post-Blackish,” she says of the ABC family comedy, which aired for eight seasons. “But I had a mission to join the chorus of voices that are working to make this world a safer place so people can be free to be who they are and take pride in that.”

Beyond I Am America, she cowrote and hosted The Hair Tales, a six-part 2022 OWN docuseries that explored Black women through their hair. (Ross, Oprah Winfrey and Michaela Angela Davis were all excecutive producers.) She voices the main character and exec-produced the upcoming animated film Jodie, a spin-off of the ‘90s cult classic, Daria. Last fall, she launched PATTERN, her bestselling hair care line that targets curly, coil-y and tight hair textures. Ross reports that she’s about to enter “the plug-in world” with a blow dryer and four attachment accessories. “I’ve made these things completely out of my own heart and experiences,” she says.

Granted, these projects were in the works long before viewers saw Bow and her husband, Dre (Anthony Anderson), move out of their Sherman Oaks home in Black-ish’s April finale. But they all happened to coincide with a milestone event in Ross’ life: Her 50th birthday.

Reaching the half-decade mark last October proved empowering, even for someone with confidence to spare. “I’ve worked incredibly hard to feel the way I feel at 50— and I don’t mean all the trappings of the success in my career,” Ross says. “To hold space for myself every day comes with a mixed bag. But the reason I can have this compassion for others is because I’ve learned to have compassion for myself. I’ve learned to support myself in a different way, and now this is how I navigate the world.”

GROWING UP ROSS´ISH

She’s navigated it as the daughter of 78-year-old Motown music legend Diana Ross. And there’s a reason why the lineage has gone unmentioned until now. “Early in my career, I was very specific in that I had no interest in using who my mom was to get things,” she says. “Even now, a bell is going off in my head because I know that answering one question about

her is going to be a headline.”

Besides, she says with a laugh, “The thing that cracks me up is that I’m a 50-year-old adult so I’m not, like, my mom’s child anymore!”

That’s not to say Ross isn’t close with her—“her icon-ness doesn’t hold a candle to how iconic she is as my mom”—or isn’t proud of her eclectic upbringing. Born in L.A. to the Grammy-winning star and music executive/manager Robert Ellis Silberstein, Ross boasts that she never had a “straight-line” life. She uprooted to NYC in the late 1970s so her mom could film the 1978 musical The Wiz and resided there through eighth grade. (The couple divorced in 1977.) She then lived in Paris and Switzerland for two years to attend boarding school and headed back to California to what she calls “my childhood country home.”

Ross says she inherited her performance and “connection” genes from her mom. “She can go on stage at one of her concerts and make everyone feel like she’s singing directly to them,” she says. She adds that her dad, 77, is a gregarious and funny storyteller who passed down the trait to both her and her younger sister, Chudney. (She has three other half-siblings.) “I’d get in trouble in school because I’d just interrupt class to tell stories and imitate people with my body to make everyone laugh,” she says.

Ross dabbled in teen modeling, graduated with a theater degree from the prestigious Brown University and worked as an unpaid intern at Mirabella magazine right out of school. Next, she moved to New York Magazine to help shore

up its fashion department. “I came out of my mom’s womb ready to shop and steal all her clothes,” she jokes.

Her first foray into professional acting? Two rounds of auditions for a role in Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X biopic starring Denzel Washington. She didn’t get it, but the casting director pulled her aside to compliment her instincts. “She said, ‘I think you might want to consider doing this,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘So what do we do?’”

Step one was move back to L.A. Ellis armed herself with a three-ring binder full of audition calls and dutifully pounded the pavement. She came up (mostly) empty. By the late 1990s, her agent dropped her with stinging words that Ross can still recite note-for-note. “I’ll never forget it,” she says. “She said, ‘You come with all these amazing things. You’re stylish. You’re greatlooking. Your mom is a somebody. Then you walk in a room for an audition and you just don’t pop. Nothing happens.’”

Ross says she held on to that rejection “for a long time.” Yet she admits that the agent wasn’t necessarily wrong: “It’s not true to say that actors need to have thick skin in this business. I believe that acting is sharing yourself with someone and being open with porous skin and an open heart. But something really wasn’t translating in the room. I had a big personality but was painfully shy.”

The conversation proved to be a turning point. “I decided that I was going to continue acting as long as it was fun,” she says. “I didn’t want to act to get validation that I was worthy as a human being. I had to separate those things and not get caught up in people’s opinions of me.”

She also felt the need to transcend her mom’s last name. “I knew from a young age that people paid attention to me because I was an extension of someone they loved,” she says. “I felt it was very disingenuous for me to ride on the love that she had.”

Instead, she carved out her own success. By 2000, she landed the role of successful lawyer Joan Clayton in the sitcom Girlfriends. It centered on four young Black women looking for love and adventure in L.A. and aired for 172 episodes on UPN and the CW through 2008. She also appeared on CSI and the Grey’s Anatomy

spin-off Private Practice. Then, in 2014, she captured our hearts as the cool-headed wife, doctor and mother of five in Black-ish. Aside from the Golden Globes, Ross was nominated for five Emmy awards for her performance.

For all of her and the show’s accolades and acclaim, she says the highlight was hanging in the hair and makeup trailer, pre-pandemic, with all her costars. “There was music and joy and lines being read back and forth,” she says. “I think that joy translated onto the screen.”

ON HAPPINESS

Besides the satisfaction of bonding with costars and a job well done, she finds joy in her home and in time with friends and family. She enjoys puttering around her house solo and catching up with her close girlfriends at a dinner “called for 7 p.m. the latest.” Asked when she’s happiest, she describes scenes from her childhood home: “I love being in the bedroom napping and the doors are open and I hear the never-ending rustle and screaming of all my nieces and nephews. Then I go to the kitchen and we’re all cooking, talking, eating and hanging.”

And she’s determined to build a joyful life her own way. “A husband and kids isn’t the only place to find meaning—all those cultural norms don’t work for me,” she says. “I don’t understand how our world is still so steeped in those old-school ideas that have nothing to do with humanity or who we are and who we want to be in the world. I’ve learned it’s OK if I have a story that doesn’t match the picture that someone wants to make for me.”

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2023-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

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