Sitting on a terrace in her RayBans, floaty off-the-shoulder dress and golden tan on an unusually sunny day in Dublin, you can easily see how Dublin model-turned-TV presenter Ruth O’Neill fitted in during her five years living in Los Angeles.
There she fulfilled her career dreams by working for two major American TV networks — covering serious news at ABC and frivolous entertainment at E!
But this summer she quit her job, sold her vintage convertible BMW and the contents of her apartment in West Hollywood and moved home.
‘I think people look at America and think it’s amazing but you’re going to be worked to the bone and you’re going to get no holidays,’ the 27-year-old complains, with a slight trace of an American drawl.
Then there’s the ‘weird’ dating scene. Ruth is single and only had one relationship while she was there — with an Irishman.
‘That ended badly so I’m not going to get into that. But, yeah, I go the whole way to LA to date a Galway boy,’ she chortles, rolling her eyes. ‘I dated loads of Americans, loads of different guys — actors, managers, producers, music producers, Hollywood equity guys, Harvard boys. I dated all sorts,’ she says.
‘But oh my God, like, everyone is dating five people at the same time so you don’t know where you stand with anyone. There are so many beautiful women and there are so many weird people as well. It’s like being in a bad episode of Sex And The City.’
And though ‘all the men are good-looking in LA’, Ruth reckons Irish men are preferable because they don’t take themselves too seriously. She’s not even that interested in looks, which she says is why she’s not on Tinder and has never used online dating sites.
‘I really didn’t want to go on another date with one more guy who said, “My therapist says…”’ she groans.
‘A lot of people in LA are in therapy and on anxiety pills and antidepressants. They’re not in therapy for traumatic stuff, it’s just, like, chit-chat. I’m like, “Call your Mum, it’s cheaper. Save yourself $500.”’
The UCD commerce graduate left Dublin in 2010 after coming third in the TV3 show Totally Xposed, which sought a replacement for Lorraine Keane when she resigned from Xposé. Sean Musanje won the six-month contract.
So having lost out on the telly job here, did Ruth leave for LA with something to prove?
‘I was doing it for me, it was never for anyone else,’ she says. ‘But I did want to challenge myself and I wanted to, yeah, I guess, be taken a bit more seriously and show I’m really passionate about this and I really want to learn a lot,’ she admits, of pursuing a TV career in the States.
‘It was kind of hard because I had been modelling through college and then I did that show and I thought, “I need to separate myself and do something else.”’
Because Irish people had put her into a certain model-wannabe-telly-star box? ‘Yeah, exactly.’
Ruth’s father Declan was a trader on Wall Street in the Eighties and living in New York with her mother Vanda, a Polish immigrant, when their youngest of two daughters was born.
Later the family settled in leafy Castleknock, Dublin, but Ruth retained her American passport.
‘I didn’t have any plan — it was kind of mad,’ she says now of her decision to move to LA.
‘I thought, “I’m going to go. Let’s book the flight.” One-way flight, two suitcases, on my own. I thought I’d get an internship but I realised when I got there that you can’t intern unless you’re in college in America because it goes towards points. I kind of thought I’d go for the summer and see how it works out and then I was going to apply for the journalism Masters in DCU.’
When Ruth got to LA she had, by her own admission, no contacts, no jobs and no friends.
She found accommodation on Craigslist, sharing an apartment with a French and German girl.
She says Irish people are hard to come by in ‘La-La-land’.
‘It was bang in the middle of Hollywood, right off Sunset [Boulevard]. It was mad, wild. We had people in the apartment all the time. I was out all the time because I was trying to get a job and meet people,’ she says.
‘I had no experience apart from one or two little things I did for TV3. So I had next to no experience.
‘I was straight out of college and in, like, the most competitive market in the whole world. So I was asking everyone that I met for help.’
LA is all about networking and Ruth, with her laid-back, open charm, eventually caught a break.
‘I met a guy on a boat. Someone invited me to a party on a boat so I went and the guy said, “I work for production for MTV” and I said, “I wanna work in TV” and he gave me a job. And then he kept hiring me. So I worked freelance for the first year. Then I thought, “I need to get into a newsroom, I need to start learning journalism skills.” So I got a job in ABC News, through meeting people again.’
Ruth met a girl whose friend worked in ABC and who told her what to put on her resumé and coached her before she met her boss.
‘I had never met her before and she completely helped me out. LA is like that — someone helped me so I’m going to help you. That’s what she said to me. I got her a bottle of champagne for helping me and she was like, “Oh no, I’m, like, paying it forward.” It was so American.’
Ruth began as a news assistant then became an associate producer at ABC. By now she had moved into an apartment in West Hollywood on her own because of her erratic work hours. She was often expected to work a day shift straight after coming off a night shift and said it was ‘probably the toughest job’ she will ever have.
‘Everyone was sleep deprived in there, everyone screamed at each other all the time. It was really fast paced and really cut-throat.’
Did she scream at anyone? ‘No, I don’t like doing that.’
Did people scream at you? ‘Oh, yeah, everyone screamed at me,’ she laughs.
Around this time, RTE hired her as entertainment correspondent for a new show called Juice. ‘So I started doing entertainment news for them and interviewing celebrities. Juice only lasted for one season but it was so much fun. I was doing that at the same time I was working at ABC News. I was working like crazy.
‘While I was doing that I was thinking, “This is so much fun. I want to move into entertainment.” The hours are more normal, the content is more fun and there was loads going on.’
She wrote a list of the top ten companies she wanted to work for and entertainment network E! was number one.
‘I got a contact for E! through, again, asking loads and loads of people, hustling for contacts.’
Eventually she landed a reporting job. ‘E! was fun, it was brilliant, but it’s very competitive — so many people want your job. You’re competing with other people in there for covering events and celebrity interviews and pitching ideas.
Every day you had to have five new ideas to pitch so I was up at 5.45am and sometimes I’d cover events until midnight or 1am. I worked so many weekends as well,’ she says.
Among her favourite celebrities she interviewed were actress Kate Hudson and Girls creator Lena Dunham.
‘You see celebrities everywhere, you see them in their wild habitat, like, in front of you at Starbucks or sweating with you in a spin class. Charlize Theron used to take my spin class. She worked so hard in that spin class,’ chuckles Ruth. ‘But she was, like, incognito, in a cap, very hidden.
‘I used to always see the Jonas brothers around, like Nick Jonas and Joe Jonas. I don’t know if one of them had a house near where I lived. I saw Miley Cyrus, Kendall Jenner. You’d see them in Runyon Canyon where I used to walk a couple of times a week.’
Ruth has a ‘more pared-back’ look fashion-wise now and wears ‘less make-up, definitely’ because of LA’s influence. Her dress today is from a shop called Reformation, which was on her street in LA, and sells recycled clothing.
‘They only sell, like, 200 units of everything. Loads of celebrities are wearing it now,’ she says.
‘Everything is a bit more casual in LA but people will buy a really expensive white T-shirt and really expensive jeans. The hipster look is obviously big in LA.
‘It’s a bit more rock ‘n’ roll or a bit more vintagey and pared back there. But people are much more obsessed with their bodies, their skin and what they’re eating than how they dress.
‘People work out twice a day in LA,’ she says. ‘At the start I was resisting it but then it becomes part of your lifestyle and the classes are so good there.
‘I always felt like the most unfit in classes because no one takes a sip of water, no one’s out of breath.
You’re just like, “God these people are like robots.”’
Ruth got ‘really into yoga’ and went four times a week. She grumbles of not having found a decent class yet in Dublin, but she’s still looking.
Reports suggested her return was because she got a job on a new RTÉ fashion and entertainment show called Bounce.
But in the end the show wasn’t commissioned and Ruth won’t say anything about it. She insists her decision to leave LA was based on personal reasons.
‘I just didn’t see myself marrying an American and having kids there,’ she says.
Two of her close friends are now engaged — ‘Yeah, and I can barely get past two months,’ she quips — and she felt time slipping by.
‘The thing with LA is it’s such a time warp because there are no seasons. I thought, “Whoa, I’ve been here five years. Do I stay here and move home later?” But then you’d probably be Americanised and probably a bit stuck in your ways. ‘Probably by then all my friends would be married and have kids and I’d be the weird single friend from LA.
‘I probably already am and that’s fine,’ she laughs.
Her sojourn also gave her a fresh perspective on her homeland.
‘You have to leave Ireland to appreciate a lot of things about it. I think a lot of Irish people don’t know how good they have it.
‘The lifestyle is so good here, apart from the weather.
‘It’s a nice pace, it’s not as hectic as a lot of other cities and I think you can have a nice life here.
‘Irish people go on more holidays than anyone I know,’ she exclaims.
‘People must be racking up three or four holidays a year. And they’re right. They know how to enjoy themselves.’
In America, by contrast, she was ‘the only one’ who took a week’s holidays to come home for Christmas and felt she was ‘frowned upon’ for doing so.
‘I was looking at the rest of my friends on Facebook with their boyfriends and going on holidays to Ibiza and enjoying their lives and I felt like all I had was my job. I was just, like, “What am I doing?”’
Ruth is very close to her parents, who visited her once a year and counselled her on Facetime.
‘Mum would say, “You’re obsessed with your job!” and my Dad would say, “Your job isn’t who you are” — because in LA it is.’
So, what next? Ruth is taking some time out. After that her ideal job would be covering a mix of light and serious news on TV — ‘maybe even a morning show’.
If she doesn’t find it here, she might move to London like her good friend Rachel Wyse at Sky.
She hasn’t ruled out returning to America either, but to New York this time.
One thing is for sure — she’s not tempted to return to LA and to get a therapist.
‘No,’ she laughs. ‘I probably left at the right time before I needed one!’
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