Let’s clear one thing up: Ruby Rose has not moved back to Melbourne permanently. Not yet, anyway.

“Every time I visit – or even don’t visit – there’s usually an article or 10 about me returning home,” the actor says, laughing. “Apparently, two years ago, I was living here at Christmas for months and months – I was like, ‘I haven’t been back home in five years!’”

Tabloid interest in Rose’s comings and goings is something that the 37-year-old has had to reckon with since she entered the Australian consciousness, first as a model in her teens, then as a presenter on MTV. She got her big break in Hollywood in 2015 with a role on Netflix prison drama Orange is the New Black. Since then, her star has risen, particularly in the action world: she’s appeared in the likes of John Wick, Resident Evil and SAS: Red Notice, as well as the title role on the CW network’s Batwoman.

Rose has made headlines for her personal life and politics, too. In 2014 the actor released Break Free, a short personal film that aimed to bring conversations about non-binary and gender-fluid identities to the mainstream (Rose uses she/they pronouns). Until 2018 she was in a highly publicised on-off relationship with Jess Origliasso, one half of twin-sister pop act the Veronicas.

Rose meets Guardian Australia in late June at Her Majesty’s theatre in Melbourne. The actor is still living in Los Angeles with her three rescue chihuahua mixes but travelled back to her home town last month to prepare for her stage debut in the thriller production 2:22 A Ghost Story.

She’s meeting her co-stars in person for the first time too: Remy Hii, Daniel MacPherson and Gemma Ward. Journalists and photographers wait outside, and when the foursome appears it’s Rose who speaks first, waving and offering a cheery “hey guys!”

Remy Hii, Gemma Ward, Daniel MacPherson and Ruby Rose at the media call for 2:22 – A Ghost Story. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

Dressed in a long silver coat and looking every part the glam movie star, Rose is all smiles. She gapes up at her own face plastered on the theatre’s side, pointing excitedly.

After the media call, we take a seat upstairs. “I’ve done stage work as far as some public speaking, hosting and DJing but this is very different,” she says. “It’s the muscle of acting – you need to train the body and it’s this great creative outlet. But to be doing that at this level, it’s a lot. It’s thrilling.”

Written by Danny Robins and directed by Matthew Dunster, 2:22 follows a couple and their friends as they try to figure out if their house is haunted. Debuting in West End in 2021, and having since played in Los Angeles, the spooky show has attracted big-name casts: the likes of Lily Allen, mononymous singer Cheryl and Tom Felton, all making their theatre debuts. (It seems Melbourne is hungry for thrills: the West End hit Ghost Stories made its Australian debut there last year.)

“It’s very conversational, relatable, interesting and smart, and it has all these twists and turns that really took me on a ride,” Rose says of the script. “It’s such a whole-body experience.”

Rose has stayed largely out of the spotlight in the last couple of years, after controversially leaving her role on Batwoman. In February she returned to tabloid headlines after posting about an upcoming memoir that promised to “piss a lot of people off” – “On the sisters? You’re first,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

‘There are many more things going on in the world than what Harry Styles is wearing.’ Photograph: Drew Gurian/Invision/AP

Rose is in a place of self-reflection. Although she’s chatty and seems relaxed, there’s a sense of vulnerability that feels sincere. “I don’t know that I’m a naturally gifted famous person,” she says. “I’m a very, very sensitive person – I almost started crying two seconds ago, but from a good place, and I’ve cried almost in every interview today.

“A couple of years ago, I might not even have felt as open to have this interview right now … and now I’m just like, I’ll just talk. I’ll just be myself, whichever way it gets received, or whichever way people take it or twist it.” When she tells me she doesn’t read gossip about herself – “I don’t really care about any of that stuff” – she checks herself a beat later: “I’m sure that I’m probably lying.”

After so many years of having others speak for or about her, the actor is keen to tell her story on her own terms – but it’s been a slow going. Rose started writing the memoir a decade ago but stopped when she was finding it “too much”. Working on a new version of the book has been “a lot of discovery”.

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“I’m glad I didn’t release the one back then – I cringe at some of it,” she says. “I’ve had ups, I’ve had downs – I’ve lived very publicly and not always been the best representation of myself.” Her memoir, she hopes, “could help people, and I think it might be good to get it out of myself”.

When Rose last returned to Australia this year it was as an ambassador for the LGBT youth organisation Minus18. The charity played a formative role in her own adolescence; it was where, at 15, she found a queer community. She remembers “seeing people be openly affectionate in public for the first time” there; “the person that’s dog-sitting my dogs right now I met at Minus18, and we’ve been friends for 20 years,” she says.

It’s easier for many to be queer and out these days – in some sectors, there’s even money to be made from associating with the culture. Celebrities from Harry Styles to Taylor Swift have recently been accused of “queerbaiting”: a charge that essentially boils down to appropriating queer signifiers as an aesthetic only.

Ruby Rose in 2016 at the 27th Annual Glaad media awards in LA. Photograph: Buchan/Variety/Rex/Shutterstock

For Rose, that particular discourse is a distraction – there are bigger issues facing the LGBT community, particularly the “horrific anti-activism” threatening the lives of trans people. “I do protect the community and I obviously do listen … [but] just because I’ve been open and out since I was 12 doesn’t mean that I think that anyone else has to be,” she says.

“People are having to come out to be like, ‘I’m not queerbaiting – just so you know, I’m bisexual,’ and I just don’t think that’s the way it needs to be … [There are] many more things going on in the world than what Harry Styles is wearing.”

In her first 48 hours back in Melbourne Rose has already visited her old workplace – Fitzroy’s Evelyn hotel, where she was a bartender.

Work and social commitments aside, she’s got the same idea as most other people visiting the city: “I’m going to eat my way through Melbourne.”