Julia Fox Finds Her Way

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Josh and Bennie Safdie’s latest film, Uncut Gems, opens with a guttural and pulsing shot of the interior of a man’s large intestine on screen at a colonoscopy, which turns out to be the quietest moment of the entire movie. The colon belongs to Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweler in New York’s Diamond District who relishes in risky behavior and high-stakes gambling, taking part in increasingly stressful antics which kick off the moment he leaves the doctor’s office. Riding an adrenaline rush that persists until the final scene, it’s unclear whether Howard is unraveling in his scheming or if he is a gambling savant. At the center of his frenzied life is his young party-girl mistress Julia, played by newcomer Julia Fox, who adds both calm and chaos and commands his attention simply by being such a magnetic woman.

The Safdie brothers worked on the script for Uncut Gems for ten years and knew early on that Fox was destined for the role of Julia despite her lack of acting experience. Longtime friends, they had begun discussing the part with her over five years ago, but she says she initially didn’t give it too much thought as she saw them temporarily shelve the project to work on other films, including the Robert Pattinson-driven Good Time. By the point Uncut Gems finally entered pre-production, studios and investors were leery about hiring an unknown actor to play a main character, and although she was the Safdies’s first choice, Fox still had to audition for the part. Following a successful chemistry test with Sandler, during which they shopped at Barneys and sang karaoke, she beat out a rumored three hundred other actors and found herself on set. “I was very nervous because I kind of felt like, ‘What if I tricked everyone into thinking I could do this?'” she admits, “and then once they yell action I find out I just completely don’t know how to act?” It turns out her place was well deserved—Fox’s portrayal of Julia has captivated Hollywood, even earning her a nomination for the Breakthrough Actor Award at last year’s Gotham Awards.

There are some similarities between the 29-year-old Fox and her character Julia, which is no coincidence. In order to make her performance as authentic as possible, the Safdie brothers often asked her what she herself would do in any given situation, and Fox would provide them a number of potential actions. In one memorable scene, Julia gets a tattoo of Howard’s name to try to undo the damage of a previous fight, which was inspired by a moment in Fox’s own life. “I kind of wrote that in there myself. Josh asked me, ‘What would you do in this situation?’ and I gave him a list of things I had done and that one I guess stood out. He was like, ‘Do you mind if we write this in the movie? We think it’s hilarious,’ and I was like, ‘Okay!’” she says. “But I was nervous because I was like, ‘Oh shit, what if it’s not received well and then I ruined the whole movie?’ But it played really well, people always reference that scene, they love it. So it worked out.”

Fox had a lot of life experience to draw upon when she was fleshing out Julia. Born in Italy, she moved to the United States to live with her father when she was five and considers herself a New Yorker. Her childhood was often adventurous and chaotic—by the time most people begin their partying, she was already long over it, having been well-known on the club circuit since her mid-teens. “It was crazy! There was always something going on,” she says about growing up in New York. “I always had a lot of anxiety. It was overly stimulating, you know what I mean? There was always something happening, I was always getting involved in something I shouldn’t have been getting involved in. You have so much access and when you’re a kid, you’re so impressionable, you feel these adults around you and you just want to be like them. I feel like childhood and New York are not really synonymous, like you can’t have both, it’s one or the other.”

Fox bounced around New York working odd jobs including a stint as a dominatrix in her late teens before a successful run alongside her close friend Briana Andalore as part of the duo behind the high-end women’s knitwear line Franziska Fox, which was popular with both the fashion industry and celebrities. Despite its popularity, they eventually decided to shut it down and Fox began to focus her energy elsewhere. “After doing that for a few years I felt so empty and so unfulfilled,” she says, “and I decided I was going to publish an autobiographical art book incorporating some photography, some poetry, stuff like that.” The result, Symptomatic of a relationship gone sour: Heartburn/Nausea from 2015, is a brutally honest look at three of her own dysfunctional relationships, including one that landed her in Page Six after her former partner attacked her in a popular nightclub. “I was really scared when I did the book because I wasn’t sure how people were going to respond,” she says. “It turns out people really loved it and it got a lot of attention and from there it just skyrocketed and I ended up doing a lot of other things and exhibitions and more books and stuff like that.” Her follow-up book, PTSD, is another intimate exploration, this time following a six-month stint in Louisiana where she lived in a trap house. She says any initial hesitation at sharing such personal moments of her life was contemplated and quickly dismissed. “It was like, if I don’t do it someone else will,” she says. “I feel like you really need to own your shit and live your truth or else you’re just going to be exposed later down the line. I would so much rather just be open about whatever it is that I’ve done so that there’s just no way that it can come back and bite me later. I’ve always been upfront about it, I’m not ashamed about it, it’s who I am.”

For Fox’s next chapter, she says she sees a move to Los Angeles and a shift to focus on Hollywood, but not only as an actor. Shortly before filming Uncut Gems, she shot her directorial début, “Fantasy Girls,” which examines child sex trafficking in Reno, Nevada. “My friend Cara and I knew we wanted to make a short film, but we weren’t sure where or what. I was writing a few scripts but none of them seemed right and then we were like, ‘Why don’t we just go somewhere and we’ll uncover a story once we’re there?'” she recalls. They settled on Reno and, as soon as they arrived, passed a group of twenty children on the side of the road hanging out by a dumpster. “I was like, ‘This looks interesting,’ so I just popped a u-ie and pulled up and we were talking to the kids. There was one girl that stood out in particular so I met with her mother, who she doesn’t live with, but by law, I have to—I can’t just abduct a child for a project. After talking to the mother we discover that there’s a huge issue with child sex trafficking and underground prostitution rings and girls going missing left and right.”

Fox became interested in the issue and decided she wanted to investigate it through a scripted short rather than a documentary. After writing a script and a couple more trips to Reno to secure locations and lock in her cast, she began principal photography. “It was a life-changing experience, probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I just remember looking at Cara in the middle of the shoot and saying, ‘You know that if we can do this we can do anything right?'” she recalls. “It was that hard and there were just so many complications.” Despite facing these challenges, Fox is thrilled with the outcome and sees her future in film shaping up. “We did and it was a miracle. I never really felt better about anything in my life so it’s nice because now I feel like I’m heading in the right direction. I’m on a really good path.”

Uncut Gems is out now.