Tracee Ellis Ross: "I don’t live my life for other people, I just totally live it for me" (2024)

There's a meme of Tracee Ellis Ross that is always making the rounds on social media. She’s in a pool, leaning against its side, looking impossibly glamorous; with a promising blue sky behind her and her hair slicked back, she holds a tumbler of crystalline liquid forward in a languorous toast to the camera. It’s a visual lingua franca for a lot of things: a beacon of ease, sophistication, style; an icon of the rich-auntie aesthetic – that is, a celebration of a woman who lives as much for her own interests and desires as she does for creating a sense of family with those she chooses. All things that signify a woman who has made a good life for herself.

"I kind of find it flattering," she tells me from her home in Los Angeles. "But [social media] can be a little scary." Yet the 49-year-old entrepreneur, activist, Golden Globe-winning actress and daughter of Diana Ross is uncannily adept at it. She posts throwback photos of fabulous outfits from her twenties alongside witty commentary about the rituals of life as a working woman. "For me, it is genuinely a sharing. I don’t manipulate things for the internet. I’ve always been this person. I used to drive my sister nuts because I was always doing my little photo shoots."

Ross’ persona online has that elusive, aspirational attitude: unbothered. In the adjective’s usage in certain sections of Black culture, it is specifically gendered. ‘Unbothered’ is a distinctly feminine attribute, and it comes with a certain level of maturity and experience – the sense that the holder of it has seen and understands the contradictions and unfairness of the wider world but looks upon it all with a deep bemusem*nt and does not let it keep her from charting her own trajectory. Ross explains: "I didn’t see enough examples of different versions of how a woman can find happiness and joy and power and sensuality, sexuality, all of that, without it being through the lens of how I’m seen by a man. People are like, 'You’re the poster child for being single.' And I was like, 'Great.' But what I would prefer is that I’m the poster child for living my life on my terms. And that there’s a version of that for everyone."

"I don’t live my life for other people," she continues. "I just totally live it for me. This is something that has really solidified itself into an unbreakable, unshakable foundation in the last four or five years." The last four or five years, of course, have included the phenomenal success of the hit US television series Black-ish, in which she stars as Rainbow ‘Bow’ Johnson, the overachieving doctor, mother, and wife of Dre, the show’s narrator. In a fragmented cultural landscape, Black-ish remains one of the few comedies that aspires to address the entire country, even as it speaks from the very specific viewpoint of America’s Black professional set. Since its 2014 premiere, the show and Ross have both received dozens of award nominations, with Ross taking home the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy in 2017. Production is underway on the show’s final season, which will begin airing this spring.

Despite the heady success, Ross is reluctant to link that professional success to the popular perception that she leads an opulent life. "That meme where it says 'rich bitch juice' [on the glass]...it’s a little much for me. It’s really just tequila with melted ice," she deadpans. She opens her eyes wide in mock innocence. "I don’t know how rich the juice is."

Ross is in the sweet spot of celebrity where she is a ubiquitous presence but never wears out her welcome. In the States, you can watch her on television five days a week, through reruns of Black-ish. The day I was conducting my first interview with Ross, my sister taped a piece of paper from her children’s Page-a-Day calendar to the front of my laptop; it was a quote from Ross herself, on perseverance. After our conversation, I took a break and went to my local supermarket, and there was her hair-care line, Pattern, on the shelf as I looked for scrunchies for my daughter.

And yet, she has the ability to make each encounter – mediated or direct – feel fresh. Each time I saw her, whether acting or in conversation, it felt as if I was running into an old friend, the one who is always rushing off to do interesting things but also can’t wait to sit down with you for a long time to tell you all about it.

That warmth and deft understanding of magnetism is even more surprising when you take into account that, as a daughter of the Supremes’ superstar singer Diana, she has been intimate with celebrity and show business since birth. A childhood spent in the limelight might mean a closing-off, but it seems to have had the opposite effect on Ross. This paradox is evident in an anecdote that her long-time friend, the writer and activist Michaela Angela Davis, tells me about first meeting Ross more than two decades ago. (Davis and Ross are executive-producing an upcoming docuseries The Hair Tales, on Black women’s identity through the lens of Black hair, for OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network and Hulu.)

"I met Tracee in a closet," Davis says. "She was working in the fashion closet at Mirabella, and she was receiving clothes that I had pulled for a shoot. I had no idea who she was, except that she was cute and she was a girl of colour where there were none. When I say none, it seems odd to imagine, but if you could go back over 25 years and look at any major magazine, there were none. She was just so cool. She was that girl. And she wore a very sophisticated mix of designer and vintage. She’s got on Halston today, and yesterday she had on 1972 Céline because she was also wearing her mother’s vintage clothes. Hello! And she worked really hard, and she was focused. She didn’t work like a rich girl. She wasn’t outdressing Jade Hobson, who was the creative director [then], but she was killing it every day." (Mirabella is also where Ross met and became friends with US Harper’s Bazaar’s editor-in-chief Samira Nasr.)

Davis continues: "She said, 'My mother would love you!' I said, 'OK, that’s cute. Your mother would love me.' I thought maybe her mother was a society lady. So I get this address to go to the Sherry-Netherland. And it’s a different name, obviously. I go in, and the doorman lets me in. And I go up to the penthouse, and the elevator doors open, and Diana Ross is standing in front of me. That began our long friendship. We are both really interested in style and joy and justice."

Ross could have conquered fashion, but a career in television beckoned instead. Her tenure on the small screen spans the sea change in both how TV is made and what sorts of stories by and about people of colour are allowed to be told. In 2000, Ross got her breakthrough role in the comedy series Girlfriends, which gained a global audience in 2020 when it was released on Netflix. The show came at a time when Black stories had disappeared from the traditional big-three US television networks only to flourish on newer ones.

Girlfriends ended in 2008. "It was such a huge portion of who I was and had become," Ross explains. "Especially because Joan wore a lot of Tracee’s clothes. Joan and Tracee’s hairstyles were the same. All my favourite lipsticks were Joan’s favourite lipsticks. My shoes were Joan’s favourite shoes. And although we weren’t the same person in any way, shape or form, my physical self was really being utilised. It took me time to kind of figure out who I was again. When the show finished...in hindsight, I could say I was sort of going through a bit of a grieving process."

In the years that followed, Ross continued to work in TV and film before getting cast in Black-ish, which ran through the end of the Obama era and the totality of Trump. It is a family sitcom in the style of All in the Family, with its continued interest in topical subjects and its willingness to explicitly explore questions of race, gender and class. But while its predecessors had a handful of Black writers on staff, Black-ish is significant because its writers’ room is made up of mostly people of colour.

Writing recently in The Atlantic, the critic Hannah Giorgisspoke of the "negotiated authenticity" of Blackness on television: "Blackness, sure, but only of a kind that is acceptable to white show-runners, studio executives and viewers."

"There were a lot of instances on Girlfriends when I used my voice powerfully and it wasn’t well-received," Ross says. "People don’t want to be told that what they’re doing might not be the right thing or might not make everybody happy. But I am somebody who – I don’t just go along to get along."

The two defining performances of Ross’ television career – Joan on Girlfriends and Bow on Black-ish – exist outside of that dance of ‘negotiated authenticity’. The storylines of Girlfriends definitely bear that mark, but Ross chose to play Joan as a recognisable figure to Black strivers and overachievers. On Black-ish, in contrast, Bow is a working mother who stays curious about herself and the family she’s created. Like all marriages in comedic plots, hers is one of opposites brought together for laughs. But beneath the comedic tension, Ross plays Bow as a woman who finds the frictions between herself and her husband and children fascinating, a wonder of life, something ultimately to take joy in. Dre, Bow’s husband, may sometimes tease her for being a geek – that is, overly enthusiastic and earnest about her surroundings – but Bow is a geek for the people in her family. She genuinely likes them, a rare emotional note in sitcom parents. Anthony Anderson, who plays Dre, says: "It’s a great shorthand that we have. There’s a freedom to being able to work alongside an actor like Tracee because it takes the fear away. We can become kids together and just get lost on the playground as Dre and Bow."

Tricia Rose, a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University and Ross’ friend of 10 years, says: "She is a quintessential example of someone who’s been able to be successful and recognised and rewarded more than some others but, at the same time, is so profoundly underestimated and underappreciated for what her gifts really are. Her actual creative and comedic genius are so profoundly underrated. And that’s all tied up with gender, with race." Rose continues: "Yet she figures out a way to be cognisant of all that, but it doesn’t control what she chooses to do. It doesn’t determine how she perceives herself. It doesn’t engender any jealousy or brittleness about others. It’s her management of that that’s pretty much like a blueprint for everybody."

For her role on Black-ish, Ross has been nominated for an Emmy five times. Her first nomination, in 2016, was the first time in 30 years that a Black actress had been nominated for a lead role in a comedic series.

As Ross reflects on the near-decade she has spent playing Bow, she says that this time, ending a long-running show and putting a beloved character to rest feels different. "I’m ready for it to be the end, and also it’s going to be really hard. I mean, over eight years we’ve watched the TV kids grow up. We’ve watched Anthony’s beard do tons of different things," she jokes, breaking into a wide grin. But also, "I found my voice. It came before, but I really started using it during Black-ish."

Ross has been vocal about issues of representation in media and political representation for women. In 2020, she hosted the second night of the Democratic National Convention, highlighting the historic nomination of Kamala Harris for vice president.

"Black-ish offered me a different and larger platform," she says. "I’ve always been a person who speaks up. I can’t help it. Sometimes the practice for me is – perhaps the exercise today is to not speak up."

Outspokenness, boldness and a professed desire for justice are all commendable attributes in girls and women now, but Ross remembers when it wasn’t that way. "Listen, learning to be me has been a really long journey," she says, her face suddenly serious. "I tried being small and feeling things in little ways. It took me a long time to get to know myself, to accept myself, and even on some days to really like and love myself. And then it took me a whole other load of years to have the courage to actually live in the world as that person. And it’s been trial and error, chewing on ground glass. It’s been a hard-earned journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance. I mean, I came out of the womb like this. I literally think I was like, 'Woo-hoo! I’m here. What have you got? Let’s go!'"

Ross tells me a story from her childhood. "My paediatrician said to my mom when I was teeny weeny, 'Here’s the deal with Tracee. She’s a ball of energy. And your job as a parent is to just help guide it in the right direction.'" She holds up both hands and makes an ushering motion to the air in front of her, as if urging an unruly imaginary puppy to heel. "'You cannot change this energy.' I have many a memory of really genuinely thinking that who I am was wrong. Just wrong. And that I had to learn to be somebody else or I was really going to ruin my life. And the biggest epiphany and opening for me was that, no, the best I could do was actually be me."

Unabashedly being herself extends to a candidness in our talks that is refreshingly rare. Frequently, Ross will pause, a word escaping her memory. "Oh," she explains matter-of-factly, "I’m going through perimenopause at the moment. It’s really frying my brain."

What has that experience been like? "It is really bizarre, but it is the most glorious invitation into a new season and chapter in my life. There’s no information about it. There’s shame talking about it."

But her understanding of this next adventure has come from the family she has created for herself. "My friend Michaela told me, 'This is an invitation into your wild-woman phase, to being a moon driver. You have spent years being driven by the moon, and now you are going to drive the moon' And I was like, 'That’s right. I’m about to drive the moon,'" she says with a laugh.

"Another friend was like, 'Your womb will no longer have to be thinking it’s going to make a baby. You can fill it with all your creativity.' And I was like, 'That’s right. I’m going to make babies of projects and things out of my womb.'"

"I’m the sexiest I’ve ever been. And when I say that, I mean I feel the most myself. And the information is just not out there. And it’s as if you get to this age and – what was that Tina Fey sketch?" she asks, referring to the one Fey starred in on Inside Amy Schumer called ‘Last f*ckable Day.’ "It’s like, they’re going to cart me off in a canoe into no man’s land. f*ck that. Shut up. I’m going to be sexy all over the place," she says, flashing the sly smile again. "Living my life with my juice."

The final time we speak, it’s the morning of the Met Gala. Later that day, Ross will appear on the red carpet in royal-blue Balenciaga Couture. When we speak, she’s in her hotel room, which she has made her own, having knotted up one of the curtains to better let in the light, her voice in concert with the taxi horns coming up from the street. At one point, a horn sounds loud enough to drown out her words, and she breaks from her story to yell back "Hello, New York!" in salutation.

I ask her again how she comes to feel at home in the world, in all these shifts of time and self. "Because of the childhood that I had and my mother’s career, from an early age, even though I couldn’t define it at the time, I had to find a sense of home and safety within my body and with people. It wasn’t always about a space, and that remains for me," she says.

"Home for me is about safety and embrace. It’s about shedding all the external masks that we have to wear out in the world. Home is really about beauty, safety, history. My friendships are home for me. My family is home for me. It’s an energetic connection that creates a sense of safety and groundedness, where I don’t have to wear any mask. I can just be myself."

Photographs by Renell Medranos, styled by Samira Nasr

‘Black-ish’ is available to view on Sky TV. ‘Girlfriends’ is on Netflix.