Tracee Ellis Ross Felt Lost in Hollywood. Then She Changed Course.

Tracee Ellis Ross’s career once depended on a man in Italy picking up the phone. It was 2000, and the then-27-year-old actor desperately wanted to accept an offer to star in the UPN sitcom Girlfriends. The role of neurotic, perpetually single lawyer Joan Clayton was Ross’s dream job: Until then, she had mostly appeared in little-seen indie films and TV movies. So the chance to lead a comedy-series ensemble could help her establish the identity she’d been craving since she was little, growing up as the daughter of the legendary singer Diana Ross. She felt she could earn the unconditional adoration that her mother received from her own fans. She could quiet the scrutiny of the skeptics who doubted her talent. She could pay her own health insurance.

Ross pictured herself on a boat—not a canoe or a kayak, but some massive vessel, an ocean liner, perhaps—beating back the turbulence and tides of instability inherent to a career in Hollywood. With Girlfriends, she could be its captain. But because she was a cast member on an MTV variety show, she had to be released from her contract with Viacom. UPN gave her 48 hours to lock down the gig, and the Viacom executive who could sign off on her departure was in Europe, ostensibly unreachable.

And so, Ross explained to me earlier this month over Zoom, she became “literally frozen with fear” in bed for two days. Reenacting the scene for me, she sprawled across the sofa in her Los Angeles