Julia Fox never set out for Hollywood. As a New York-based conceptual artist and fashion-forward fixture of the city’s downtown scene, she was more at home in galleries and at underground parties.
A friendship with the Safdie brothers changed everything. When the directors were casting Uncut Gems, their rattling drama from 2019, the studio pushed for Scarlett Johansson or Lady Gaga, but the brothers insisted on Fox.
Charismatic, unpredictable and a walking headline generator, she was invited to screen-test with Adam Sandler, the film’s star. Despite having no formal training, Fox landed the role and stole every scene.
“My first day, seeing hundreds of people, cranes, equipment, I thought, Oh, s**t, this is real,” Fox says. “I didn’t understand the magnitude of the opportunity until I got there. I was overwhelmed but excited. Surreal. In awe.”
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Today the 35-year-old is reclined on a chaise-longue in a Soho hotel. She stretches out her fabulously mismatched nails to shake hands. The London paparazzi are lurking outside. Sure enough, her outfit, the sort of preppy goth ensemble you might wear if your classmate was Edward Scissorhands, makes tabloid headlines within hours of our meeting.
“I worry I overshadow any character I do,” she says playfully. “I’m trying to tone it down a bit, but it’s hard.”
Fox is, as we speak, at the top of the US box office with Him, a proudly bonkers American-football-themed horror, in which Tyriq Withers’s ingenue enters a Faustian pact with Marlon Wayans’s gridiron veteran. With several curtsies towards Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and assorted Kardashians, Fox has a ball playing Wayans’s socialite wife.
“It was a really good time,” she says of the Jordan Peele-produced project. “Everyone in the cast and crew were exceptional people. I personally think my character Elsie is so enigmatic. There’s more to her than meets the eye. She’s a powerhouse in her own right. I just love her. She’s the ultimate Wag, the queen of the Wags.”
[ Uncut Gems: How Adam Sandler and the Safdie brothers made a jewel of a filmOpens in new window ]
As the Safdies had with “Julia”, her character in Uncut Gems, Him’s writer-director, Justin Tipping, was keen for Fox to put her own stamp on her role. Before filming started she immersed herself in Basketball Wives and similar reality shows, but on set Tipping wanted Julia to channel Julia.
“He wanted all of us to do our own thing and to be ourselves,” Fox says. “He was super chill and got really excited when we would just go off and start saying things that weren’t on the page.”
In the six years since her big-screen debut, Fox has worked with Steven Soderbergh on both No Sudden Move and Presence and with Tony Kaye on The Trainer. This year she has appeared alongside Camila Mendes and Anna Baryshnikov in Idiotka, and Vanessa Kirby in Netflix’s Night Always Comes.
“Working with a woman and working with a man are completely different,” Fox says. “With Vanessa we went so deep so fast. We really did the work and unpacked a lot of stuff and built a lifelong friendship in a matter of days. Whereas with the guys it’s a lot more laid-back and relaxed. But both ways work.”
Fox’s early years were shaped by upheaval and self-reliance. Born in Milan, she lived in small-town Lombardy until she was six, then moved to New York, where her father lived.
“I’m a New Yorker,” she says. “I’m very, very impatient. But in my heart I’m also Italian. At my core I’m Italian.”
She returned to Italy often as she was growing up. But her parents weren’t always around. Left to her own devices, Fox was thrust into adult situations far too young, drinking and socialising with much older people before adolescence was over. She also had plastic surgery as a teenager. Catholic school and family structures offered little sanctuary; the mechanisms she developed to cope with the chronic instability included a survival-first swagger.
“I always knew I didn’t belong in Catholic school,” she says. “I was pretending to be that, but I knew there was more to life. Childhood in New York and my childhood in Italy are not comparable. You can’t really have a childhood in New York.
“In Italy we had nothing. We lived in my grandpa’s one-bedroom apartment, but it still felt rich. My mom was studying and working all the time, but we had great food and simple pleasures, like going to the park or picking grapes. You don’t get that in New York.”
Fox’s disarming memoir, Down the Drain, from 2023, includes a string of unsettling episodes that show how normalised danger and exploitation became in her youth. She had frequent encounters with predatory adults that she only later understood as abuse, alongside a pattern of substance misuse that led to multiple overdoses and a psychiatric admission.
She recounts taking on work as a dominatrix during adolescence, describing intimate and degrading encounters with significantly older clients. That experience provided a bizarre source of income and some early performance training. One episode found her waking up after a glamorous-sounding trip to discover she had likely been drugged and violated, an incident she initially suppressed.
Fox is taken aback by the person she used to be. “Oh my God, I used to think I was invincible,” she says. “When you’re young you take life for granted. You haven’t really experienced loss or death yet, so you don’t realise how fragile life actually is. It’s ignorance but kind of a blissful one.
“Now I’m so much more aware. I just want to feel safe and cosy. I don’t need any thrills. I’m totally fine without them. I don’t enjoy adrenaline any more. I just want everything to be calm and soft. That’s definitely a trauma response, but it’s where I’m at.”
As a twenty-something Fox cut quite a dash in New York. In 2005 she launched a women’s fashion label with a friend, showcasing her eye for angular streetwear. Simultaneously, she immersed herself in visual and conceptual art: raw, autobiographical exhibitions that blended photography, sculpture and personal ephemera. Her work often explored trauma, addiction and survival, including a show where she painted with her own blood and staged her own funeral.
“I just say ‘artist’ as a job title,” Fox says. “It’s an umbrella term that encompasses it all. I have so many different mediums and interests. I like to try new things. I get bored easily. It’s the New Yorker in me. I always want new endeavours and new mountains to climb.”
An early social-media star, she has built a powerful online profile, with 1.7 million followers on Instagram and 1.9 million fans on TikTok.
“I feel so blessed to have that warmth and that steady kind of community around me that really embraces me and understands me,” Fox, who now has a four-year-old son, says.
“I just want to champion them and uplift them. I want women to stand in their power and not succumb to the pressure of society, and just do whatever the f**k they want to do and not feel like they are on a clock or that they have an expiration date, because it is such bulls**t.
“It is just not true. Life gets better as you get older. It is not something to be stressed out about. That was a huge revelation for me, realising that getting older is actually amazing and a gift.”
That sounds like good news for all.
“I would never want to go back to being in my 20s. Ever. I am so happy to be getting older.”
Him is in cinemas from Friday, October 3rd
