Yael Stone scored her big break with her role as inmate Lorna Morello in the hit Netflix prison drama Orange Is the New Black. But instead of pursuing a Hollywood career after the series ended in 2019, Stone walked away from it all.
After securing a coveted US green card, Stone’s initial plan was to live and work between the US and Australia. Then the black summer bushfires hit, and the carbon emissions required to jet between the two countries no longer felt right. So the Sydney-born talent quit acting, returning to Australia to join the climate fight and founding Hi Neighbour, a not-for-profit that trains steel and coal workers to work in renewables.
By her side through it all was her partner, Jack Manning Bancroft, who Stone met in primary school – then reconnected with two decades later. The pair now live in the northern Illawarra region of New South Wales with their two daughters.
Vital to her sanity at home is a small black object Stone insists is not a vibrator – though it may look and sound like one. Here the actor turned climate activist tells us about the healing properties of that miniature massage gun and shares the stories of two other important belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I’m embarrassed to admit I’d save my diaries. There is no genius prose, no wild insights, just a hell of a lot of handwritten details of my life. Mostly they were penned across late nights, with eyes swollen – once with teenage tears, but these days it’s parental fatigue. It used to be all love affairs gone wrong, now it’s baby’s first words and climate change.
I think some part of me hopes that one day I’ll read them all in succession and everything will make perfect sense.
My most useful object
The most useful object in our house is not a vibrator. It will sound like a vibrator in my description, no matter what I do. So please just remember – I am not talking about a vibrator.
We call it the “dooga dooga”. It is black, triangular, with a foam pad that pounds up and down with a violent jack hammer action – still not a vibrator. It’s a ninja-level massage tool that has become essential after the kids are finally asleep. Its lowest setting rattles my teeth and almost makes me want to spew, but in a good way.
After jamming the dooga dooga into my own trapezius, the knot you get from wrestling a two-year-old into a car seat loosens just enough to allow me to eat a block of excruciatingly dark chocolate.
The item I most regret losing
When my sister and I were little we’d record radio programs into our tape deck. There was this one particular tape, with a paper label that read “Judy’s Scales” which featured all our best gags. We’d listen to it over and over, toasting to our bad American accents and well-timed fart jokes. Mum used to cry with laughter and I was sure we were a genius comedy duo.
But one day Judy’s Scales went missing, and I felt like Dumbo without his feather. For years after I would turn the house upside down looking for it and couldn’t understand why Mum and Elana weren’t helping. I felt like we’d recorded the best part of our childhood and, by losing it, we lost our magic.
Fifteen years or so later, the night of my 21st birthday, it all made sense. No one understood as my mum and sister played some crackly audio of two little kids snorting and farting over the PA but I exploded with joy. They’d hidden it from me and watched me searching for it – never saying a word.
Yael Stone and Jack Manning Bancroft feature in an episode of Australian Story, available to stream on ABC iView
