Julia Fox, Diamond in the Rough of ‘Uncut Gems’
nytimes.com
Julia Fox, Diamond in the Rough of ‘Uncut Gems’
Nathan Taylor Pemberton
10-13 minutes
encounters
The role of a young lifetime: oneself.
Going up? Strolling old haunts in the East Village neighborhood of New York City.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
- Published Dec. 9, 2019Updated Dec. 11, 2019
Julia Fox’s progression from downtown Manhattan persona to actress in the new Adam Sandler movie “Uncut Gems” might sound like an impressive run of luck. Ms. Fox, 29, says she manifested the entire thing.
Manifestation, she reminded while waiting in line at the East Village pastry shop Veniero’s on a Sunday afternoon last month, is when something that you say will happen, happens. Like the time two years ago when Ms. Fox and her best friend went on a road trip to the desert looking to participate in a peyote ceremony with the first spirit guide they encountered. The guide, they stipulated, had to be a woman.
After several hours of driving around the Navajo Nation reservation at the border of Arizona and New Mexico with no leads, tripping lightly on mushrooms, and nearly ready to call off the search, Ms. Fox declared that not only were the pair going to find their female shaman, she’d be waiting for them.
“We had pulled off to the side of the road because I had to pee, and we see a little yellow car with a woman just waiting in it,” she said. “So, we go up to her, and we ask her what she’s doing there, and she says she’s waiting.”
Waiting to exhale: Ms. Fox, smoking and carrying her friend Gianna’s chihuahua-themed purse.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
Carb talk: Pointing to the cannolis, pignolis and cheesecake at Veniero’s.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
Ms. Fox paused for dramatic effect against the chatter of customers anxiously awaiting their Italian pastry. “And the woman said:
‘For you.’”
Did this really happen? Maybe that matters less than the fact that Ms. Fox sees her whole life as playing out under the terms of a self-willed destiny. And that at this juncture, tapping at a glass case of ricotta cannoli in the bakery where she once worked for a brief spell in high school, that destiny appears both inexplicable and inevitable. Or at least: she’s just signed with a Hollywood agent.
Directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, “Uncut Gems” takes place in Manhattan’s diamond district circa 2012, a strange moment in time when The Weeknd (who has a small cameo in the film) was a budding superstar and Apple’s iPhone 5 was a signifier of financial excess. The story follows an erratic, Gucci-wearing jewelry dealer named Howard Ratner (Mr. Sandler) whose compulsive gambling habits create comic misery for those around him. Ms. Fox plays the part of Howard’s high-dollar showroom saleswoman and mistress, who also happens to be named Julia.
As Howard’s pursuit of a big payday unravels — thanks in part to the actions of the NBA star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) and a family member (played by the actor Eric Bogosian) who is owed a sum of money so large that he curdles into a violent thug — Ms. Fox’s character moves through the film like a, yes, diamond in the rough.
City lights: A shot from “Uncut Gems.”Credit...Julieta Cervantes
Many involved with the film, along with most of Ms. Fox’s friends, insist that the Julia of the film is based intimately on Julia Fox, with the same habits, energy, tendency to “always have a scandal,” as she put it, and even style.
“She is that real New York City girl that this film needed,” said Miyako Bellizi, the film’s costume designer and a longtime friend of Ms. Fox’s. “She deserves a lot of credit for the film, especially the look for it. Everyone’s been asking me about Howard, and it’s like, ‘but what about Julia?’”
‘A Friend of a Friend of a Friend’
Ms. Fox was born in Italy, but raised in Yorkville, an Upper East Side neighborhood east of the posher Park Avenue. Girls from this neighborhood, Ms. Fox said, can be summed up as such: “Cute. Doesn’t look like a mess but actually is a mess. Always carrying a nice bag, but no money in it.” And: “Not to be messed with,” she said, using a more vulgar word, “but we look nice, and we sound like we’re from Long Island.”
Like the onscreen Julia, Ms. Fox is a no-nonsense city girl, unguarded lover, valuable henchwoman, and worthy sparring partner with a fondness for brightly colored Versace and of course, diamonds. (She wore $300,000 worth from TraxNYC, a 47th Street jeweler whose owner also has a role, to
the film’s New York premiere.)
In one of the more brilliant sequences of “Uncut Gems,” Ms. Fox and Mr. Sandler’s characters have a couple’s brawl set off by Howard’s bullish jealousy outside of the nightclub 1 Oak. In a single tracking shot that runs down West 17th Street, the pair howls profanities at each other like a blacked-out couple on spring break. As Mr. Sandler’s character attempts to escape in a cab, Julia throws herself in front of the moving vehicle, twice, before giving up the chase with a defeated, and elongated, four-letter word.
“I mean, that’s Julia,” said Briana Andalore, one of Ms. Fox’s closest friends. The pair met over a decade ago at a party in the East Village, to which Ms. Fox arrived with a cat in her arms. “I don’t know even know how to say it other than, that is her. We’ve had those moments. We’ve actually been outside of 1 Oak, screaming at a car. It’s like the time we once stopped to yell at my stepdad’s car in the middle of Bleecker Street.”
Blooming: Ms. Fox mid-sentence at Lucien, a restaurant.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
Ms. Fox refreshes her lipstick.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
The Safdie brothers encountered Ms. Fox at Jack’s Wife Freda, a cafe in SoHo (
shades of Lana Turner at Schwab’s). Josh Safdie said any similarities between her and the character were purely coincidental, at first. Then he let her read the script.
“When she finished, Julia asked me if I had been spying on her because she thought that there were so many strange similarities with the character,” Mr. Safdie said. “But she gave me good feedback, so I would call her on a whim when I had writer’s block, and I would ask her for advice. The character was just kind of constantly evolving to become more specific to her.”
Before her film debut, depending on whom you ask, Ms. Fox could have been described as a clothing designer (she ran a knitwear brand with Ms. Andalore) or as a model, having posed for Playboy’s “last” nude issue in 2015. Others still might know her best as a sporadically exhibiting painter and photographer. In a 2017 gallery show, “R.I.P. Julia Fox” she claimed to have used her own blood as paint for her canvases. She has published two books of photography that quickly became cult items on the independent book fairs circuit. Ms. Fox could be called an activist, too, having driven a carful of supplies to the Standing Rock tribe’s 2016 protests of the Dakota Access pipeline and helping clean up afterward.
“I remember stumbling into her universe through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend,” Josh Safdie said. “And at first, you couldn’t quite figure out the type of person that she was, and it was very, very alluring. It was exciting. She was constantly redefining who you thought you were talking to.”
Richie Shazam, a longtime friend of Ms. Fox’s and a photographer who curated her 2016 exhibition, “PTSD,” said: “Julia’s able to be, like, this scientist who’s able to experiment with all the ways she envisions beauty in her brain. Through her stimulation, she’s able to concoct all of these different products that can be euphoric or completely dark and dystopian.”
‘Fantasy Role Play’
The photos were taken during a period in which Ms. Fox briefly lived in New Orleans, and document a tempestuous relationship in harshly lit scenes where drug use, blood, and sex is paired with tranquil suburban landscapes, like a white cat crossing a street. “She has this way of creating a synergy between the two, which is very mystifying to me, because so few people can do that so well.”
Waiting for the light to change at 1st Avenue and 10th Street. Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
And if people ask Ms. Fox how she got into acting?
“I just tell them that’s really something that started in my dominatrix days,” she said. According to Ms. Fox, those days began after Catholic school near Lake Como, Italy and a tumultuous stint living with her father in an East Village apartment, from which she moved out at 18 with her clothes stuffed in plastic bags. She had worked at low-paying service jobs (shoe store, ice-cream shop); heard about a girl in the neighborhood making better money in an East Village dungeon; found a Craigslist posting and quickly landed a job.
“It was fantasy role play. I’d have one minute before a session. They’d give you a piece of paper with the guy’s info. ‘O.K., he wants me to be like his angry mother. Got it. Boom.’ And, you’ve got two seconds to get in that mind-set.”
Ms. Fox added: “I went in there insecure and with low self-worth. I didn’t understand my value. I left with too
much self-esteem. Nobody was going to ever cross me again.”
Sometimes a listener might wonder if Ms. Fox is exaggerating, especially when she is offering her story in quick summary, as she did earlier that day at Lucien, a bistro and longtime haunt of hers. Before she could take off her fur-lined leather coat, she was greeted by two of the three diners sitting inside the virtually empty restaurant.
“I’m not going to lie, I woke up at noon, and I was like, ‘I’m going to have to shower and plan an outfit.’ So, this is what you guys got,” Ms. Fox said, glancing down at her sheer silver top. She ordered cauliflower soup and, festively, oysters, It was her one-year anniversary of marriage to Peter Artemiev, who works in private aviation in Brighton Beach, and whom she met through Lucien’s proprietor, Zac Bahaj. “We actually both forgot because I got one of those alerts on my phone.” She said she manifested him, too. (“Like ticking off boxes on a checklist, he was everything I said I wanted.”) Two months later, they were married.
Ms. Fox wasn’t a lock for the role she had shaped. The addition of Mr. Sandler and the powerful producer Scott Rudin to the project meant that beyond manifesting her acting career, she’d also had to earn it with a screen test.
“Pretty much every single girl in New York auditioned for the role of Julia,” Ms. Fox said — around 200 by the Safdies’ count, and some very well-known. “And they all knew that it was my role. It was so awkward to run into these girls: ‘Hey, I think I just auditioned for this movie that’s based on you.’ They thought it was a movie about my life.”
“Luckily, all those girls were busy,” Ms. Fox said of the well-known actresses as her food arrived, giving a sweetly sardonic smile. “And they were over budget.”
Leading Man
He’s a little more famous.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 15, 2019, Section ST, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Within ‘Uncut Gems,’ A Diamond in the Rough.
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the whole time.
Good riddance
