“I don’t have my master's in being gay,” Ruby Rose says from the makeup chair, sinking into a fluffy white robe. “I mean, I might now, but I didn’t then.”

We’re at Milk Studios in Hollywood, where Rose, 33, is being photographed for her Glamour cover—she’s one of three trailblazing women on TV being featured on our TV Issue—and talking about how much has changed since she got her start in the early 2000s in her native Australia.

“I was always Ruby Rose, the lesbian MTV VJ, the lesbian model, the lesbian actor,” she explains. “I was like, That's not a part of my job. That's not on my business card. I didn't study to do that, did I?”

Rose may reject those labels, but this fall she’ll play the first out leading lesbian superhero on TV in the CW’s Batwoman. This comes after a string of action films, including The Meg, John Wick: Chapter 2, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. She has also played a sexy rocker in Pitch Perfect 3 and a sexy felon in Orange Is the New Black. And though it shouldn’t be, doing all of this—the action movies, the superhero show, the a cappella franchise—as an out lesbian is groundbreaking. It means she’s quietly queering narratives that have historically been reserved for heterosexuals.

When she arrived at the shoot, she looked like a paparazzi photograph of a celebrity at LAX brought to life—complete with an oversized denim jacket, a matching drop-crotch pants, and a designer hat and sneakers. The thing is, she really did just come from LAX, en route from Vancouver, where she’s currently shooting Batwoman. When we talked, we flanked the body of a makeup artist; sometimes she maintained eye contact with just one eye while her makeup artist dusted the other—a level of muscle control I found both admirable and chilling. It felt as if we were in the eye of a storm, a hurricane of L.A. characters whirring around us.

At the center of it all was Rose—calm, cool, and collected as gales of pandemonium whirled around her. She remained the consummate professional, even somehow finding the energy to humor me in a conversation about celesbians. (That is, lesbians who are also celebri…you get it.)