INTERVIEW
Meet the rising model-turned-actor set to take over our screens – and playlists
THERE’S A PRICKLY KIND OF THRILL TO having coffee with someone who is teetering between anonymity and fame – something about the mix of caffeine and clairvoyance makes even the most jaded culture journalist remember why she started doing this in the first place.
I can tell the waiter at this hip TriBeCa café knows the feeling, as he shakily places a mug of black coffee in front of Devon Ross, a clean-faced beauty with a raven-coloured Seventies shag cut. On the morning in question, we are a few days away from the Cannes premiere of Irma Vep – the HBO mini series in which the 22-year-old model makes her acting debut – where she oozed Old-Hollywood glamour and Gen-Z je ne sais quoi in a cream silk Celine gown and pearl-dotted finger waves. Still, I get the sense our waiter knows she is someone he should be able to recognise.
Similarly, Ross’s black jumper bears the face of a woman who looks familiar, but I can’t seem to place. ‘It’s my boyfriend’s mum,’ she says – that is, Susie Cave, co-founder of the clothing brand The Vampire’s Wife; spouse to musician Nick Cave; and mother to Ross’s partner, the actor Earl Cave. Ross met Earl while shooting a Disney x Gucci campaign in 2020. ‘We didn’t really talk that day,’ she says with a smile. ‘We were both very shy, I was on the clock, and it was, like, 4am backstage at Disneyland. I got to see Chewbacca with his mask off, smoking a cigarette!’ She laughs, recalling having been scolded by Disney staff for trying to FaceTime a friend, and quickly regrets telling me the Chewbacca story, pleading, ‘Don’t come for me, Disney!’ into my recorder.
Ross became aware of the Irma Vep project through her modelling agents, and submitted an audition tape. ‘I’d never done a tape in my life. I only know what one is because my boyfriend is an actor,’ she says. ‘I was outside my doctor’s office when they offered me the role. I was like, “What? Are you joking?”’
Writer-director Olivier Assayas’s series is about the attempt to remake a 1915 French silent film (Les Vampires), and is also an updated version of Assayas’s own 1996 film, also called Irma Vep (the name of the lead character in Les Vampires and an anagram of ‘vampire’). It’s funny and smart and meta, and it’s the kind of project one expects from Assayas, who began his career as a critic for the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Ross met Assayas right before filming began, and the two hit it off. ‘He’s the coolest guy,’ she says. ‘He was in London in the Seventies, which is my dream. I was like, “Tell me everything!”’
Watching Ross’s tape, Assayas felt stunned.
