“What a beautiful cat!” Ruby Cruz squeals. The Sex Lives of College Girls and Bottoms star is overcome with excitement when my calico interrupts our Zoom conversation, and she proceeds to tell me about her own cat that lives with her brother. As if she doesn’t have many other, bigger things to be excited about right now.
The 24-year-old actor is a new addition to season 3 of Sex Lives of College Girls, the Max comedy from Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, which follows four roommates at Essex College as they figure out friendships, relationships, and themselves. It also sent Reneé Rapp, who exited the show earlier this season, into the lesbian stratosphere. One of the show’s many charms is the queer fantasia that is Essex College, which, in this current season, has welcomed new characters like Taylor (Mia Rodgers) and Cruz who plays Ash, Taylor’s love interest. Getting to play queer characters isn’t new for Cruz, who also identifies as queer, but what was new was not having to audition. “I was offered the role, which was my first offer. That’s always something you hear about from your agents, let’s work towards offers. So that was a really big moment for me and honestly was shocking,” she says. “I took a phone call [with Justin Noble] and he really sold me on the show. He basically was like, ‘You’re gay, the show is gay. You want to be a part of it?’”
Ash is first introduced in an episode where Taylor goes speed dating and there is immediate chemistry between their characters. So when they meet again after a queer rodeo party (what a dream!) and Ash saves Taylor from frat guys on the loose, you have to root for them to make it happen. And when Cruz gets to say, “Suck my gay dick!” with equal parts humor and swag, it’s easy to imagine someone somewhere watching that scene and knowing Cruz is their gay root. “That was a big moment for me. It felt therapeutic to yell that into the ether,” she laughs. But comedy is something that she’s still figuring out. “Comedy is so interesting because I feel funniest when I’m with my friends. It feels foreign and awkward sometimes to try to be funny to people I don’t know. It’s been a new experience of trying things out and seeing if they work.”
While she didn’t do a ton of scenes with other members of the cast, she found an anchor in Rodgers. They bonded over being new to the series while Cruz thought about questions like, “Why is Ash interested in Taylor?” and “Why is Taylor letting Ash into her world?” The show does a good job of showing these two falling for one another without sacrificing humor. When they very quickly move in together, nary a U-Haul joke is made, which makes the scene even funnier—but Cruz mentions that there was one left on the cutting room floor. “I don’t even know if you see it, but I was loading all of Taylor’s stuff into my Subaru. I was like, people are very intentional with the details here, and it’s appreciated,” she laughs. We joke that in order to replace Reneée Rapp, The Sex Lives of College Girls had to up the ante on their queer characters this season. “I like that line of thinking. … If we lose one, we gain five,” Cruz jokes. With the season 3 finale approaching tonight, she’s hoping that a season 4 renewal will bring Ash back; she did a lot of background work that she hopes will come out as the character is more established.
With her hair still slightly damp and wearing a gray sweater, Cruz is fresh from a screening of The Sex Lives of College Girls at the LGBT center the night before, so she’s been thinking about her career in the context of the queer roles she’s played. “I didn’t set out to be like, I am going to play a bunch of queer characters. You know what I mean?” she muses, sipping on a beverage. “And the fact that Justin called me and associated me with playing another queer character, I was like, that’s great. To end up in that position, I feel so lucky. It’s really cool to contribute to something that I wanted as a kid, [to have] more mainstream queer stories.”
Ruby Cruz as Ash in The Sex Lives of College Girls.
While Cruz has appeared on series like Castle Rock and Mare of Easttown, her breakout roles have been queer-identifying. She played Kit Tanthalos in 2022’s Willow, a Disney+ sequel series to the 1988 film, and was regarded as the first openly lesbian Disney princess by her instant and fierce fanbase. Cruz describes it as the most important experience of her life, shooting in Wales for nine months on such a huge production. However, in 2023, Disney removed the show from Disney+ to cut costs, but the character of Kit continues to resonate with fans. “I still have people reaching out, even though you can’t even watch it anymore on Disney+, which is baffling. It’s made me so sad that people can’t reach it anymore. I feel really grateful that it reached a lot of the people that it should have reached, and in this way that people really care about it and still really care about it,” she smiles sadly.
Cruz’s feature debut was in Emma Seligman’s Bottoms, the 2023 raucous high school comedy about a lesbian fight club co-starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri. Cruz played Hazel, one of the club’s co-founders, who’s equally awkward, hilarious, and charming. She’s the butt of jokes from Sennott’s PJ and takes on some of the film’s most unhinged physical comedy. Bottoms, much like Willow, is clearly an experience that will stick with Cruz throughout her career. She considers her time on that set to be an education in comedy, stunts (“I love being on a wire”), and generally collaborating with her peers. But her most treasured memory from production was of a sunrise between shoots. “What I think about a lot when I think back to Bottoms filming was this one moment: We did a lot of night shoots, so the hours were pretty all over the place, and I would carpool a lot with Havana [Rose Liu] and we would drive home. We would stop the night shoot when the sun came up. So naturally, we saw all of these insane sunrises. It was Louisiana and [there’s] something about the Southern sky.” After one particularly grueling night shoot with Liu, they saw what Cruz calls “the most life-changing sunrise I’ve ever experienced.” She adds, “It was life changing.”
Cruz, who grew up in Los Angeles, is surprised she wasn’t exposed to queerness earlier than she was. But she remembers theater and certain films “pinging” something in her. “The first queer movie I feel like I watched was Blue is the Warmest Color, which is so hardcore, so intense, and a wild thing to read about the making of. When I watched it, I definitely was shocked. And I definitely think it was very formative.” She slowly ponders what else struck her, adding, “I think in fourth grade I watched Jennifer’s Body. I was pretty young at that point, 8 or 9—another ping. It’s really cool for me to contribute to those pings now for other people, because it was really movies and media that exposed me to parts of my identity.”
Cruz is looking forward to a lot of things this year. She’ll be in Chad Hartigan’s romantic comedy The Threesome, co-starring Jonah Hauer King and Zoey Deutch, which she describes as “full of heart.” She also took on a role in Apple TV’s For All Mankind, a series about an alternative history if the space race never had ended. That was a “beast” to make and she’s happy to have worked on—and learned from—two very different projects. “Everything feels like a learning process. …This year I want to focus on things that I really connect to personally, that feel like they help pump my heart,” she says. Some of those include indies with first-time directors and making her own stuff, which she hasn’t shared publicly just yet.
The Sex Lives of College Girls’ season finale airing just as Cruz’s busy year is just beginning feels like a good sign that she’ll continue to do meaningful work, especially in playing queer characters where she doesn’t feel like she has to hide her own identity. “I remember thinking about that when I was younger because I’ve always wanted to act. I find it so lucky that I have found myself on sets and part of stories and projects that are super accepting and that are queer stories that I’ve been able to be myself entirely. I think that’s so lucky and so fortunate.”