Ruby Rose will not be playing Kate Kane for a second season. The star of The CW’s Batwoman announced on Tuesday that she has departed from the show after just one season, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with the network confirming that the titular role will be recast.
“I have made the very difficult decision to not return to Batwoman next season,” Rose said in her statement, according to THR. “This was not a decision I made lightly as I have the utmost respect for the cast, crew and everyone involved with the show in both Vancouver and in Los Angeles. I am beyond appreciative to Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Caroline Dries for not only giving me this incredible opportunity, but for welcoming me into the DC universe they have so beautifully created. Thank you Peter Roth and Mark Pedowitz and the teams at Warner Bros. and The CW who put so much into the show and always believed in me. Thank you to everyone who made season one a success—I am truly grateful.”
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The CW, Warner Bros. TV, and Berlanti Productions thanked the actor in a joint statement, adding that the new lead actress will be a “member of the LGBTQ community” and that the studio and network “are firmly committed to Batwoman’s second season and long-term future.”
The reason behind Rose’s surprise departure was not disclosed. Neither statement gave an updated airdate for the second season, which was ordered in January, or addressed whether the planned January 2021 release date is still on schedule. And although the network’s joint statement alluded to the show being taken in a “new direction,” the core creative team (including creator Caroline Dries and her fellow executive producers Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter) appears to remain unchanged.
As THR reports, the show had to shut down production early due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, leading to only 20 out of 22 planned episodes making it to air. Unnamed sources told the publication that Sunday’s makeshift finale was Rose’s last episode.
I read that the workload might be the issue. She had never done anything close to the 22 episode, 1 hour TV show thing. Supposedly both sides hit a breaking point from her unhappiness with that type of schedule. Who knows how true that is.
@1,
Yeah, and if so, it likely didn’t help that the crunch of the inaugural Season production overlapped with the equally stressful crunch of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”.
Given the role’s physical demands, and Rose’s injuries and surgery from the early months of filming, I also wouldn’t be surprised if that was another factor.
I wonder if it’s related to her injury, even if she’s reporting it’s not. After all, if she’s leaving because of the injury it may make it difficult for her to get work in the future.
It’s not a show I’ve watched, but I’ve seen her on some other shows.
I mean, the show feels a little cursed. She had her accident, almost leaving her paralyzed. Then someone else on the set did get paralyzed. Then of course the COVID crisis, which not only put a halt to production, but also providing plenty of stress. And we cant’t forget all the crud she got for the show and then some. Maybe she felt that the show was unsafe, or perhaps life was too short to spend it all on the kinds of commitments the show placed on her. Ultimately if she is happier with this choice then more power to her, but I felt she made a wonderful Batwoman for the purpose of TV.
I’ll miss her performance; I wish her well in her future projects.
I had the same back injury, and it still impacts me thirty years later. That injury means that it can happen again very easily, and it hurts like h*ll when it does. It can also stop you dead in your tracks for months. It would very much surprise me if that realization isn’t part of why she is leaving a physically brutal role.
@1,
You were right. Variety has now confirmed that the production crunch and resulting tensions on both sides were the deciding factor in Rose’s departure.
I’m more than a little relieved this seems to have been an issue of scheduling (and work-related injury) rather than anything more … objectionable. It will be interesting to see how the show moves forward after this, though one suspects that some Aftershock of the Crisis can be held responsible for this particular shift between actresses.
I wonder if this will ever be acknowledged onscreen, tongue-in-cheek or otherwise?
@8,
I’m expecting a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment akin to how Iron Man 2 acknowledged Don Cheadle replacing Terrance Howard.
But yeah, between the repercussions of the Crisis and Mouse’s tech, there are ways of giving the recasting an in-universe explanation if a creative approach is interesting enough.
Hmm, I wonder if they are going to use a Crisis aftershock to trigger a Dr Who regeneration-like sequence? There’s a web-comic that suggests Batman’s changing appearance is due to him now being a Time Lord from all of his temporal shenanigans…
@8&9: Yeah, I’m leaning toward a tongue-in-cheek in-joke. Like, in New Kate’s first scene, have her insisting to Mary that Dick Sargent was the better Darrin, or Robin Curtis was the better Saavik.
Or in an action scene, have Batwoman say “This never happened to the other gal.”
It will be interesting to see how this plays out going forward.
I didn’t watch this show either but I’m a bit surprised regarding the confirmed reason for Rose quitting the show: the long hours on the set. She is an experienced television actress and as the star of her own show she should have known going in that very long hours on set just comes with the territory. Honestly, I find it a pretty lame excuse if it is in fact true. Most actors are struggling and never achieve their big break. So many of them would be grateful to have a regular paying gig like a series commitment much less the lead of the show. I myself, as someone who has dabbled a little bit with acting in the TV/film industry and thinking about pursuing it as a new career, would jump for an opportunity like this and wouldn’t so easily walk away from it. Now if the actual reason was mental health or a physical injury, or spending more time with one’s family, then that seems a lot more justifiable to me for quitting.
@13/GarretH: “I’m a bit surprised regarding the confirmed reason for Rose quitting the show: the long hours on the set. She is an experienced television actress and as the star of her own show she should have known going in that very long hours on set just comes with the territory. Honestly, I find it a pretty lame excuse if it is in fact true.”
That’s highly unfair. Rose’s only previous TV experience, outside of a few one-shot guest roles, was in a supporting role in an ensemble series where she appeared in only 9 episodes of a 13-episode season. It hardly compares to the workload of a lead role in a star-driven series with (theoretically) 22-episode seasons, with the added demands of commuting regularly between Vancouver for interiors and Chicago for exteriors, plus the complexities of donning the Batsuit, rigging the stunts and action, and so forth.
@14/CLB: I respectfully disagree about myself being unfair, even knowing her only acting experience has been in guest or supporting roles. I’m not even in the entertainment industry and I know very well the long hours that television actors who are regulars on series put in, like 15-17 hours a day sometimes which just leaves them enough time to go home to sleep and then repeat the process. So how could she, who is in the tv acting industry, be so naive about that process? Even if she wasn’t warned by the producers of the series, she could easily do some research or ask around of fellow actors who have been regulars on TV dramas about the long hours entailed. Again, it’s hard to make it in the entertainment industry as an actor and most are struggling or broke and have to work second or even multiple jobs to get by. So I personally can’t feel all that empathetic about her walking away from a huge opportunity that many actors would kill for, (not literally of course) for the regular work and good pay. But all power to her if she decided that that’s not really what she wants to do anymore or she has no interest in working that hard/long.
@15/GarretH: There’s a huge difference between knowing something in the abstract and actually having to face it for real. There are people who get years of training for military service, who go in knowing everything they can learn about combat from the training process and the guidance of their teachers, but who still freeze up or panic when faced with the grim reality — not because they’re weak or naive, but because they’re human and everyone has a different reaction and different limits. Every situation is different and some things just can’t be predicted. What’s naive is to assume they can.
And it’s her life. Just because we watch her on the screen doesn’t mean she answers to us or is obligated to live up to our expectations. Entertainers aren’t our servants. They do what they do because they want to, because they like it and benefit from it creatively and financially. If they find it unsatisfying, they have every right in the world to walk away and they don’t owe us one word of explanation.
@16/CLB: Of course it’s her own life and she has the freedom to do whatever she wants to do. No one is beholden to me or a servant to me whether they’re an entertainer or in some other career choice. I never stated otherwise. I’m just commenting and giving my thoughts on the confirmed explanation for her departure. I’m also in no way complaining of her career decision as it is her own life and especially as I’ve never even seen the show. I’ll just reiterate that the explanation as revealed, given the context of the situation, is not one I can personally relate to.
And I get the analogy you’re trying to make of preparing for something and then the reality of it being completely different by making reference to military service but I think that is an extreme example because those are literally life and death situations. I wouldn’t put working long on hours on a television production set wearing an uncomfortable costume on the same level as serving in the military. Yes, everyone reacts to the same situation differently, but in this particular situation, the actress’s reaction was far from the norm. Producers don’t put their faith in the lead of their show lightly and it’s highly unusual for the lead to walk away after just one season and then be put in the difficult and unexpected position of having to recast said role. They want someone who can fulfill the projected commitment and tough it out through difficult conditions. Again, it’s her right to walk away if she realizes it’s not for her and for the sake of her own happiness but it’s also not as if there aren’t consequences for the rationale behind her departure as well. For instance, it may be difficult for her to secure another role that demands long hours, should she even attempt it, because she now has a notable instance of simply walking away from a production.
@17/GarretH – I think you’re seeing the business with rose-tinted spectacles. It totally is a life or death business. When Lee Majors sang about how he was willing “to die for living in the movies and TV”, it wasn’t a metaphor.
Ruby Rose experienced an accident early on in filming Batwoman which required emergency surgery and “threatened to leave her paralysed”. Even if that’s PR hyperbole, recovering from back injuries are emotionally draining. She’ll be experiencing chronic pain for years, and it possibly might never fully go away. Now, this next bit is just speculation, but I’m guessing her patience quota is lowered by chronic pain, and she’s in a workplace which she *knows* she’s unsafe.
Consider her position: she’s playing the lead character in a high-profile series in a genre dominated by male leads. Moreover, she’s playing playing one of the few openly homosexual lead characters in genre which feature almost exclusively heterosexual leads. That’s a lot of scrutiny.
So, the unconfirmed set reports suggest a lot of push back from her to the producers, so it’s not as if she hasn’t been voicing her concerns.
So we have an actor that is in chronic pain, in an unsafe environment, under a lot of scrutiny for her performance, unhappy with what she’s being asked to do, and feels like she’s not being listened to enough when she’s voicing her concerns.
Based on the assumption that at least part of her complaints were based on her not being able to deliver the best performance she is capable of, I see her considering three paths lay open to her:
1) shut up, buckle down, risking a career-ending injury or death, turn in mediocre performances, poison her future career, get vilified by the audience, the show gets cancelled and blamed on her.
2) try to stay in the job, keeping pushing back and get fired, poisoning her future prospects. If the show got cancelled it gets blamed on her for causing on-set strife.
3) quit and give a “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup speech in the hope it doesn’t damage her career to much and also hope she’s not given the producers enough of a headache that they just decide to cancel the series and it getting blamed on her.
She obviously chose option three…<shrugs> we’ll just have to see how it plays out.
@17 – Except that the unconfirmed reports said the injury didn’t play a factor in her decision. By all indications, it was simply the working hours that she was unhappy with. As the lead that would appear in most scenes, and based on other actors’ experiences, I’d wager she was easily working 16+ hour days. Not everyone is cut out for that type of life. I’m someone who is big on a good work-life balance and I would definitely walk away from a job that demanded almost all of my time. To each their own.
Ugh, I meant @18 in my last comment.
@19/Austin: Just because the injury wasn’t a direct causal factor doesn’t mean it wasn’t an influence. As Will said, recovery from an accident like that would be slow and would cause chronic pain and stress. It would make other stressors in one’s life harder to cope with.
Plus, I read a suggestion somewhere that part of why Rose took the role was probably because of its physicality, the opportunity to exercise her skills as a stunt performer, and that suffering the injury and having to stand by and watch while others do the stunts she wanted to do might have made the work less satisfying. And that’s before you add in the concerns about safety standards and overwork.
@19/ Austin – <shrugs> it’s all speculation, but I did cite the back injury as a possible contributing factor, not the direct cause.
It might be I’ve got it completely wrong, and it’s not a factor at all. Or it’s as @21/ChristopherLBennett suggests, and it’s diametrically the opposite. Instead of feeling unsafe, after her in-set injury, the producers were erring too far in the side of caution when it came to her doing the physical side of the role. It *could* be the “long hours each day” is code for “we’d be finished much sooner each day if you just let me do all the stuff I signed on for instead of trying to protect me and stopping every few minutes to swap me for a Stunt double.”
I could be wrong about that as well.
Regardless, she seems to be trying to minimise any damage to her career by spinning “it’s not them, it’s me” approach. Citing an on-set injury in the “break-up” reason doesn’t exactly so that
Well, well, the plot thickens:
Whoops, sorry:
Basically, it appears that they’re writing Kate Kane out and putting someone new under the cowl (and from the description, it sounds almost like Holly Robinson).
This is probably the best move moving forward, but I’m curious how exactly they’re gonna write Kate out.
I kinda hope the new report isn’t true. They spent more than a year establishing Kate Kane’s character and her relationships and conflicts. It would seem like a waste to ditch all that untold storytelling merely because of something external to the narrative like an actor change. I’d rather see the character recast than replaced.
Not to mention that replacing the original identity of the comics character with a newly created character would probably be seen by many as inauthentic. Granted, the Arrowverse has given us some well-liked original characters like John Diggle, Sara Lance, Alex Danvers, and the majority of the current Legends, but none of them are replacing the original bearer of a major superhero identity. (There was a White Canary in the comics before Sara, but she was a pretty minor character and a villain.) Although if it turns out she’s actually Holly Robinson (casting calls tend not to use the actual character names), that might temper it a bit, though she’s more associated with Catwoman than Batwoman.
@25,
Yeah, I mean, Holly would make the most sense since she’s the only other prominent Queer Gotham character the show currently has access to (since Renee Montoya’s tied up with the DCEU). And there’s groundwork for her being in a costume (during the tail end — heh pun intended — of Ed Brubaker’s seminal Catwoman run from the early 2000s). I doubt we’ll see Holly in The Batman and bringing her in would also allow more focus on Gotham’s East End.
But, yeah, I hope the report’s fake, too. Trying to write Kate out is too problematic and it’s just easier to bite the bullet and recast her.
Then again, if they actually are bringing in a new character as Batwoman, that potentially leaves the door open for Ruby Rose to return as Kate on a recurring basis. I wonder if that could be a consideration, the hope that they can patch things up and maybe get her back on a less strenuous, more occasional schedule. Recasting Kate would have more finality in that regard.
TV Line claims to have “confirmed” that the show is indeed replacing Kate with a new character as Batwoman.
Someone on another board suggested that the casting description resembles Harper Row, a character introduced in the comics in 2011 as Bluebird. In the main continuity, she’s a Batman ally, but in the DC Bombshells continuity, she was inspired by Batwoman’s example.