In Clipped, Cleopatra Coleman plays a woman who broke the internet before “breaking the internet” was even a phrase. As V. Stiviano, the woman at the center of the Donald Sterling scandal, she’s a mirrorball of contradictions—part opportunist, part truth-teller, part mystery wrapped in a visor. The FX miniseries reexamines the 2014 recordings that took down the racist LA Clippers owner, but Coleman isn’t interested in easy villains or victims. “I like to see it like I’m playing a character based on the myth of her,” she told me. “The version she put out into the world.”
Coleman first arrived in LA from Australia right around the time the real-life scandal was unfolding. “I remember it,” she said, “and what a time.” When the chance came to play Stiviano, she treated it like decoding a cultural cipher. “The myth of her is all the fun she had playing with fame at the time. She was smart. She was funny. She was in on it.”
Gina Welch, who wrote and directed the series, gave Coleman the key. “There’s an opening line in the script that really helped me,” Coleman recalled. “It said she’s someone with really large charisma that everyone in the room ignores. I loved that. It helped me understand her ambition—and that the show itself is about ambition.”
That ambition, in Coleman’s eyes, comes with sharp edges. “Some of it’s likable, some of it’s not,” she said. “But I saw her as a survivor. An outlier. A weirdo. I connect to that. I’ve always felt like I’m from another planet.”
Coleman means that almost literally. “I feel like an anthropologist from another planet,” she laughed. “Everything is confounding and interesting to me. Being an actor is the best way to explore humanity from the outside.” Which might explain why she fit so naturally into Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon as the alien warrior Devra Bloodaxe. “I love sci-fi,” she said. “It was such a nerdy dream come true. I just hope we get more. We even have a comic book now!”
But back to Earth—and Clipped. Coleman knew she couldn’t simply imitate Stiviano. “I studied her interviews for a while, but eventually I stopped. I just started channeling her energy instead,” she said. What grounded her wasn’t the glam or the gossip—it was the desperation. “The more I saw her as someone seeking security and safety, the more I understood her,” Coleman explained. “She doesn’t go about it like you or I would, but her motivation was pure. She was responsible for her family, estranged from her dad, doing it all on her own. That isolation shaped her.”
That empathy let Coleman lean into the absurdities. “There’s that scene where someone calls her ‘so Hollywood,’ and she just smiles and says ‘thanks,’” she said, laughing. “I love moments like that—they tell you who she is without having to explain it.”
For Coleman, the series is about power as much as personality. “Racism, misogyny, ambition—none of that’s new,” she said. “Donald Sterling’s views weren’t unique, they were just caught on tape. What’s fascinating is that he knew she was recording and still didn’t care. That’s how much power he thought he had.”
The show also captures how the fallout hit everyone around him—the players, the coaches, the public. “They just wanted to play basketball,” Coleman said. “Suddenly they’re in a political crisis. Whether or not they should take the court became a statement. It’s a great commentary on how we’re all performing roles in this theater of society.”
She credits her co-star Ed O’Neill, who plays Sterling, for helping her find balance in their volatile scenes. “He’s wonderful,” she said. “Wise, funny, kind. Made me feel completely safe. We’d shoot these intense moments, and then he’d tell the best stories.”
When she’s not acting, Coleman’s quietly creating elsewhere. “I released a song during COVID called ‘After Midnight,’” she said, almost sheepishly. “It’s inspired by shoegaze and soft grunge. I love that it’s just out there—like a little Easter egg.” She made the video while shooting a film in Bulgaria with a local production assistant. “I just wanted to stay busy,” she said. “The city was beautiful. We shot the video in our downtime. No plan—just two weirdos with a camera.”
The song itself is delicate and dreamy—part Mazzy Star, part Slowdive—and it says as much about Coleman as her acting does. “I’ve been writing since I was a kid,” she said. “My dad’s a writer, so it’s in the family. But I don’t push the music. It’s just something I like to make and let exist.”
That seems to be her larger philosophy, whether she’s in the middle of a scandal story, a galaxy far away, or a DIY music video in Eastern Europe: make the thing, then let it live its own life.
“I love characters who don’t play the role they’re given,” Coleman said. “V wasn’t supposed to have that kind of power. But she wrote her own script. And that’s something I’ll always admire about her.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
