Rose Gilroy is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter. Her latest project is SUBS, a TV series that follows best friends Eve and Grace as they abandon the traditional Hollywood path and build an empire on OnlyFans. SUBS pulls us into the much larger ecosystem that surrounds it—from influencers and vloggers to the manosphere and beyond.
Gilroy says the show was born of a fascination with “the strange intersection of intimacy, commerce, celebrity, and performance that exists within the creator economy.”
Today, Gilroy is publishing “Backstage Bella,” a short story set in the larger SUBS universe. It follows Eve and Grace beyond the events of the pilot as they encounter a mysterious new creator whose seemingly impossible rise begins to expose something much bigger—and stranger—happening behind the screen.
Check out an exclusive first look at the SUBS universe below.
Eve was still dressed as an anime elf the first time she saw Bella.
It was late on a Friday night after twelve straight hours of shooting content. She’d crossed 100,000 OnlyFans subscribers that afternoon. To celebrate, she and Grace—her best friend turned manager—ordered Nobu, took tequila shots, lit a joint, and collapsed onto the couch in the glass-walled Airbnb they’d rented above the Pacific.
Eve could remember a time when she scrolled to unwind or investigate what new girls her ex Cole had followed on Instagram. But now it was work. Survival. Every swipe was market research. Every new girl was either inspiration or competition.
Bella was no exception.
Eve was halfway through a bite of salmon tartare when she saw her.
Bella had doe eyes. Silky brown hair that never seemed to frizz or fall out of place. A face sculpted into flawless symmetry. And then there was the impossible—almost mathematical ratio—of her full chest to her tiny waist. Eve flicked to her profile.
Twenty thousand followers. Nothing. She’d seen girls with ten times that who looked half as good. But the latest reel had 1.8 million views.
The one before it, 1.6 million. There was something in the way she moved, the way she spoke to the camera. It felt natural, yet curated.
She was perfect.
“Check out the profile I just sent to you,” Eve said to Grace.
***
From that night on, Bella became the first thing Eve checked every morning and the last thing she looked at before falling asleep.
She refreshed Bella’s page between content shoots. During podcasts. Waiting for makeup. Sometimes, almost without realizing it, she’d pull Bella up in the middle of filming a vlog.
Monday, Bella woke up in Ibiza, barefoot on white stone overlooking impossible blue water, carrying a sweating green juice while the wind lifted the hem of her linen skirt.
By Wednesday she was wandering Kyoto beneath paper lanterns, biting into cream-filled mochi with her hair twisted into a loose claw clip.
Friday: Iceland. An oversized cream sweater. Coffee outside a black cabin while snow drifted sideways behind her.
The following week: Paris. Then Seoul. Then the Amalfi Coast. Then somewhere tropical no one in the comments could identify.
Every destination arrived like it had been algorithmically engineered to trigger envy. Mirror selfies in hotel bathrooms Eve had never seen before.
A different makeup look every few days—sunburnt skin in Greece, glossy French-girl minimalism in Paris, razor-sharp fox eyeliner somewhere in Seoul. Freckles one week. None the next. New bikinis. New sunglasses. Designer bags that appeared once and disappeared forever.
Bella’s captions never tried too hard.
golden hour.
still thinking about this.
guess where.
almost ready.
The other half begged for whatever she was teasing next.
"Please tell me today's the day."
Bella always stopped just short of giving her audience what they wanted. A glance into the mirror. A smile that barely registered. A gust of wind catching her skirt.
A hand reaching toward the phone as if she’d forgotten the camera was rolling. Four seconds. Six million views. Eventually Eve began noticing things she couldn’t unsee.
There were never crowds in her photos. Never bad weather. Never fluorescent hotel lighting. No crowded cafés. No tourists wandering through the background.
Every sunrise arrived on cue. Every beach was empty. Every hotel looked like it had opened that morning. Even her OnlyFans content felt impossibly... pristine.
Eve subscribed to every package. Late one night she even paid extra for a custom video. She opened it while sitting on the toilet.
Bella appeared topless, smiled directly into the lens, blew a kiss, and whispered the fake name Eve had submitted with the request. She watched it eight more times.
Eve’s obsession only deepened as Bella's reels continued outperforming hers.
“Snack Rack,” Kirby announced one afternoon between hits from a joint, scribbling across the whiteboard. “We go to high-end restaurants and Eve eats fries and shit out of her tits.”
The first “Snack Rack” video gained five thousand new subscribers overnight. Any other week, it would’ve felt like a victory. But Bella gained ten thousand posting a reel of herself sipping matcha at a cafe.
Then came Clavicular’s podcast. Grace and Eve debated accepting the invitation for months before finally deciding over cosmopolitans at Catch that the humiliation would be worth the exposure. “The manosphere is a feedback loop.” Grace argued. “They’ll call you every name under the sun in public, then buy your content in private. Hate is just foreplay for their credit cards.”
Grace was right. For fifty-five minutes, the twenty-one-year-old red-pill looksmaxxer mocked Eve, calling her everything from a whore to proof that no successful man would ever commit to an OnlyFans girl.
The clip went viral. So did Eve.
She made seventy thousand dollars in twenty-four hours as his audience flocked to her page out of curiosity.
That night, she still found herself comparing analytics with Bella. Bella had outperformed her that week. Again.
Without controversy. Without humiliation. Without even seeming to try.
***
Grace was just as fixated.
Long before Bella, the woman they measured themselves against had been Ari Kytsya.
Ari’s appeal made sense. She was stunning, but she’d built a personality alongside the beauty—Get Ready With Me videos where she’d casually discuss life as a “mattress actress,” answer awkward questions about sex work, or tell women not to be embarrassed if their vaginas weren’t the shade of pink they’d seen in porn.
Bella was different. She wasn’t funnier. She wasn’t more original. Outside of the endless travel and absurd wardrobe, her page had no obvious hook.
What bothered Grace most wasn’t that Bella was winning. It was that nobody seemed to know who she was.
In an industry where everyone knows everyone, Bella had appeared on the scene fully formed—as if she’d stepped out of nowhere.
So Grace started asking around.
At first it was casual. Slipping in inquiries over drinks at Chateau. Texts to photographers, managers, assistants. Nobody seemed to know anything.
Then came Tyler Knox’s annual Halloween party.
By twenty-seven, Tyler and his younger brother Blake had become the unofficial kings of internet fame. They’d built careers manufacturing viral moments—fake breakups, real scandals, influencer boxing matches, public meltdowns. Their Hollywood Hills mansion had become a rite of passage. One feature on Tyler’s Instagram Story and your follower count could jump fifty thousand overnight.
Eve made sure Grace never missed a Knox invitation. The house pulsed with bass. Streamers wandered room to room filming TikToks. Influencers paused conversations every few minutes to smile into someone else’s vlog before picking up exactly where they’d left off.
Grace drifted through the crowd with a tequila soda in one hand.
The answers only made things stranger.
"I heard she's with some Russian agency."
***
Grace and Eve had been best friends since kindergarten, but they couldn’t have been wired more differently.
Eve believed rules existed for a reason.
Growing up, her parents joked she would’ve made an excellent cop. Whenever the family crossed the street in their tiny Bible Belt town, Eve would stand patiently at the crosswalk while everyone else jaywalked.
"What are you waiting for?" her dad would laugh.
Grace had an almost supernatural talent for finding loopholes. If there was a way to cheat, she’d discover it before anyone else realized cheating was possible.
Their biggest fights growing up were almost always over games.
At church camp, Grace became notorious for slipping UNO cards into her sleeves whenever nobody was looking. The first time Eve caught her, their argument escalated into the first—and only—physical fight they’d ever had.
By dinner they were best friends again. Some things never changed. But Grace had learned over the years that what Eve didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt her.
Back when Grace worked at CAA—before the scandal that got her fired for recommending an OnlyFans creator to Christopher Nolan’s casting director—she’d met a hacker who went by Cipher.
At first she’d hired him for small favors: slipping into colleagues’ email accounts, pulling call sheets, confirming who was meeting with whom. Lately, though, his work had shifted. Whenever a competing OnlyFans creator was gaining traction, Grace would pay Cipher to knock her page offline for a few hours and quietly redirect traffic toward Eve’s.
Grace always knew where to find him.
***
Grace walked briskly through Koreatown before stopping outside a narrow bar wedged between a karaoke lounge and a skincare wholesaler. Inside, the place was nearly empty. Old Korean ballads crackled through ceiling speakers. Three businessmen drank soju in silence while an elderly bartender polished glasses without looking up.
The hostess approached.
"How can I help you?"
The woman’s expression didn’t change.
"This way."
She led Grace past the kitchen, through a heavy metal door marked Employees Only, then down a narrow hallway washed in blue LED light.
Cipher sat in the glow of monitors, drawing slowly from a glass hookah. Grace dropped a thick manila envelope onto the desk and slid her phone over.
“I want to know who this is. Who’s operating the account, whether it’s one person or ten, and whether those posts are coming from the same machine every time.”
Cipher took a slow pull from the hookah before exhaling a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling.
***
Two weeks later, Cipher finally called.
Grace was in the penthouse suite at Caesars Palace, courtesy of Tyler Knox. Officially, Tyler had invited them to shoot content.
Eve insisted they were “just friends.” Grace had heard that one before. The lingering touches. The inside jokes no one else understood. The way Tyler only looked at Eve when he thought she wasn’t watching.
Grace had watched Tyler discard enough women to know exactly how this would end.
And she’d watched Eve fall for enough charming men with a talent for leaving bruises—physical or otherwise—to know she’d convince herself Tyler was different.
The only silver lining was the flood of subscribers pouring in from Tyler’s audience.
Her phone buzzed.
Grace slipped onto the balcony overlooking the Bellagio fountains. Below, the Strip glittered beneath a hundred LED billboards, the Vegas heat still clinging to the night.
"I figured out why nobody can find Bella."
The music from the fountain show swelled below them.
“The company behind the account is registered through shell corporations that all lead back to Shenzhen. I scraped every image, every reel, every upload. The photos aren’t the giveaway, the infrastructure is. Same rendering pipeline. Same encoder fingerprints. Same statistical signature across thousands of posts that were supposedly shot on different phones, in different countries, over two years. A real person leaves variation. Bella never does.”
Grace stared out over the water as jets shot fifty feet into the air.
Grace looked back through the penthouse window. Tyler and Eve were tangled together on the couch, laughing at something on his phone.
***
By her third vodka soda at Tao, washed down with an Adderall and a growing sense of righteous fury, Grace had convinced herself Cipher was being overly cautious.
She fired off a message threatening to expose Bella’s operation unless whoever was behind the account contacted her immediately.
It felt satisfying for exactly twelve hours.
By the following morning, she realized she’d made a catastrophic mistake…
Creative Director & Editor: Byron Spencer (Paradis)
Photography, Styling & Makeup (Sophie Mudd): Alexa Espo