star knows full well the perception that comes with a social media star making the jump to acting. It provokes the same skeptics that countless athletes, musicians and professional wrestlers had to endure when they first embarked on their own film and television careers in decades past. But, by keeping an open mind, we now have a long list of crossover performers that we’ll forever embrace on the big and small screen.

In Ren’s case, she has the utmost respect for the craft of acting, so she started educating herself back in 2018, all in an effort to earn the same kind of acceptance that Mark Wahlberg, Lady Gaga and Dave Bautista once sought and received from the audience. However, the news didn’t go over well at first with Ren’s sprawling social media following of 25-plus million people. “When I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to try acting,’ there was not a particularly positive response.

They were like, ‘We know you as a model, stay as a model, so that I feel comfortable by putting you in a box in my head and keeping you there,’” Ren tells . “But I just ask for the grace of change, because that’s what we’re all truly asking for right now. It’s just the ability to change without judgment, without needing to be held to the past version of ourselves.

” Growing up in Santa Monica, Ren initially resisted the nearby industry and decided to zag, finding early success as a teenager on social media, specifically the 2012-era of microblog Tumblr. That eventually .