10 min read
Nestled in a leather dining booth at Little Dom’s, perhaps the New Yorkiest Italian bistro in Los Angeles, Julia Garner succinctly explains the difference between her hometown and her home here: “A friend told me, ‘New York is fun hell. And L.A. is sad heaven.’”
Garner, the shape-shifting star of Ozark, Inventing Anna, Weapons, and the new Netflix series The Altruists, casts her piercing blue eyes toward a photo of Ava Gardner on the restaurant wall, one of the classic stars Garner grew up watching on TV with her family in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. As her own star rose, she moved to L.A. six years ago. But now she’s having second thoughts. “In New York, you have to think so fast that you’re forced to be present,” says Garner, dressed Cali-casual in jeans and a striped long-sleeved tee. “Here, you don’t have a sense of time so much. The weather’s the same. There are no seasons. So you, like, daydream more….”
Only, daydreaming by the pool is not her jam. “We burn,” she says, laughing as she touches her pale arms. “I really should be a vampire, because I’m, like, allergic to the sun.”
Allan Hamitouche
Coat, Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda. Heels, Matières Fécales for Christian Louboutin.
Then there’s the restless New York striver energy that seems coiled inside her, ready to spring like her signature blond curls. Garner admits that she does not like to sit still, and doesn’t take many days off anyway. “Since January, I’ve been working almost every day,” she says, smiling and not at all complaining. “The more time goes on, I just kind of want to push it even more, and more, and more.”
Over lunch, Garner even seems restless with being herself. At moments when she speaks, I hear hints of the crass Missouri twang of Ozark’s Ruth Langmore, a role for which she won three Emmys, and the lurid Russo-Euro patois of Inventing Anna’s grifting fake heiress Anna Delvey, which launched a million memes. The actress, 32, has been burning up the screen for half her life, in one transformative, go-for-broke performance after another. She debuted at 16 as a cult initiate in Martha Marcy May Marlene, then played another cult member, then a cannibal, and then, in a move that most actors would never dare, the employee of a lecherous movie producer boss in The Assistant. When she finally did a mainstream blockbuster in Fantastic Four: First Steps, she was unrecognizable as the metal-skinned alien Silver Surfer, and immediately followed it up with Zach Cregger’s wild horror hit Weapons, as a teacher accused of being a child-murdering witch. In the last year, she wrapped The Altruists in Vancouver, shot an arc on The Studio in Venice with her new bestie Madonna (more on that later), then hurried to shoot the film Tyrant with Charlize Theron and Demi Moore—and developed yet another upcoming series, Apple TV’s Guilty Creatures, via her own production company.
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, Rahul Mishra Couture. Heels, Matières Fécales for Christian Louboutin.
So, no. Maybe the laid-back heaven of California is not for her. Garner says she misses New York’s breakneck energy, and wants to be closer to family and friends. (She does not say she wants a fresh start after her recent split from her husband of over six years, musician Mark Foster of Foster the People.)
When I ask if she’d like to talk about her separation, she looks at me like, “Are you crazy?” Then she politely declines. “Yeah, I think I’ll move back to New York.” Probably the Upper West Side. “Anywhere except for Murray Hill. No shade against Murray Hill, but…shade against Murray Hill.”
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, Balenciaga Couture.
New York is, appropriately enough, where Netflix’s The Altruists begins. The series plays as a spectacularly nerdy love story, telling the true-life saga of FTX crypto exchange co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried and his partner in business, crime, and polyamory, Caroline Ellison, a mousy math whiz who bears almost zero resemblance to the woman sitting across from me. Their meet-cute is a hedge fund job interview, in which Sam underestimates Caroline until she correctly analyzes the risks of our winner-take-all world and concludes, “Going all in every time is the mathematically optimal strategy.”
Sam, played by the Irish actor Anthony Boyle, swoons: She had him at mathematically. The two fall in love, bonded by the idealistic conviction that the optimal way to do good in the world is to make as much money as possible, then give it away. (Spoiler alert: They’re better at the former than the latter.) The two double down until they have defrauded FTX crypto customers of $8 billion, in one of the most massive financial crimes in the history of the world.
“It was the hardest job I’ve ever done,” Garner says. Known for disappearing into her characters, she says, “I wanted to see how far I could go. I want people to watch this and not see me at all. Like, at all.” Another actress might have glammed Caroline up and sanded her rough edges down. Garner asked for a dull brown wig, thick eyeglasses, false teeth, a prosthetic nose, and thick, brown contact lenses. She adopted a tighter posture; a distinctive gait; a new voice, vocal-fried to a mechanical crisp; and a series of laughs, she says, ranging from “one little hiccupy laugh” to the way she “laughs when she’s nervous” to the way she “laughs when she lies.”
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, Rahul Mishra Couture. Heels, Matières Fécales for Christian Louboutin.
Her classically trained co-star Boyle grew a handlebar mustache and pitched his own full-frontal nude scene for Netflix’s House of Guinness. Yet he remembers meeting Julia-as-Caroline and realizing, “I had to step up my game. It was astonishing. No one actually recognized her. Not one person! I was just blown away. And she is arguably the most talented person in any room she’s in.”
Oscar winner Graham Moore, the creator of The Altruists, says he told Garner she didn’t have to go to such extremes and spend almost three hours in the makeup chair every morning. “She said, ‘Oh, I’ve never gotten to act with prosthetics before. I really want to learn how.’” Moore calls her a high diver. “Given an array of options, she will choose to jump from the highest board into the deepest water. It’s not just that she loves creative challenges, it’s that the only creative choices she loves are challenges.”
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, Viktor & Rolf. Heels, Matières Fécales for Christian Louboutin.
Allan Hamitouche
Jacket, dress, Standing Ground Couture.
Perhaps the most daring part of playing Caroline was finding a way to allow audiences to connect with a woman who pilfered billions. Jinny Howe, the head of scripted series at Netflix, had bet big on Garner to do almost exactly this before, and hit the jackpot twice, as Garner made a hillbilly criminal and a New York con artist into TV icons. “She portrays what I would classify in quotes as ‘unlikable’ women with such a ferocity and humanity, where you are just like…I’m with you. She helps us understand who they are in a way that makes it impossible to feel black-and-white about them.”
“I can tell when people phone it in. For me,
if I’m gonna do it half-ass, I’d rather just not do it.”
Against all odds, you begin to care about Garner’s awkward, selfish Caroline, as you realize her brilliant brain is forever racing ahead of her slow, dumb heart. You feel for her when her erotic Harry Potter fan fic obsession is exposed (“A ride on Draco’s Nimbus!”), and when she dresses up in an Indiana Jones costume to seduce a not-into-it Sam. You may even empathize when their financial scam begins to unravel.
Of course, going all in is risky. There’s a long list of actors who have become memes or punch lines for going to such extremes (fake noses, prosthetics, obscure accents) and not pulling it off. Garner is aware of the downside risk that comes with trying so hard—painfully so. “Every job I’m on, there always comes a point in the middle of shooting where I feel like I’m messing up,” she says, scowling at her Diet Coke. “Like, I’m the worst actor. I feel like I stopped being good a few years ago. It’s like that on every job. So now I’m doing this radical acceptance, like, ‘Okay, the next job I’ll do, I’m probably gonna feel like that, and that’s okay….’”
Allan Hamitouche
Suit, headpiece, Chanel Couture.
In another effort to combat that fear, and feeling paralyzed by overthinking, she flew to France during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike and enrolled at Philippe Gaulier’s legendary clown school, which alumnus Sacha Baron Cohen had told her about. Clowning around helped her get more comfortable with embarrassing herself. “Failure is the friend of the clown,” she says. “Because ultimately, if you’re open to fail, you’re more likely to have some sort of a success.”
Sipping on her soda and staring out the sunny L.A. window, Garner says she believes the greatest risk is to take no risks and blend in just like everyone else. “Early in my career, on one of my first trips to L.A., they were obsessing about my hair and my teeth. I had to fight with them for, like, two years not to get veneers,” she says. “Fashion people were like, ‘No, you’ve got to keep your gap tooth!’ There’s this Western beauty standard that says everybody should have the same looks.” Now, she says, “everyone’s got the same teeth”—and no bite.
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, shoes, Dior Couture.
Garner, who loves the role-play and fantasy of fashion, has had the last laugh. She’s the first global brand ambassador for Loewe under its new creative directors, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, designers who share her devotion to craft and sense of off-kilter beauty. And when she thinks about those early clashes with agents, she often thinks of pop idol David Bowie. “Once Bowie got new teeth, the edge was gone,” Garner says, flashing her own crooked, gap-toothed smile. “That should say everything. As soon as he changed his teeth? He lost the edge.”
Allan Hamitouche
Bomber, skirt, tights, Jean Paul Gaultier Couture.
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, Balenciaga Couture.
Garner admits her approach is so intense she often finds she has more in common with athletes than other actors. She recalls bumping into NBA player Draymond Green at the World Cup final, where they bonded over the way maniacal preparation leaves you free to play and react in the moment—and also how, to both of them, it’s so obvious when someone, unlike you, just didn’t do the work. “Draymond said he could watch an athlete on the court and know just from their body language when they tap out,” Garner says. “And I can tell when people phone it in. For me, if I’m gonna do it half-ass, I’d rather just not do it.”
Garner also realizes that some stars are in it for the celebrity. Though she’s a fashion week regular, she’s discerning about which industry parties she attends, and side-eyes those who aren’t. “There are actors who aren’t even selective about what events they go to. I’m like, ‘How are you working and going to these events? I’m exhausted!’ Like, ‘Good on you, but I couldn’t do that.’” In a “celebrity-obsessed” culture, Garner says, “I want people to hire my acting, not me.”
“I don’t need to look perfect. I think if there is
somewhat of a mess onscreen, what
is your instinct to do with a mess? Your instinct
is to reach out and touch it and fix it.”
Later, I ask her more about acting and she closes her eyes, as if she’s trying to make sure she’s not performing her answer but choosing her words carefully. “I’m not interested in acting,” she says. “If I’m portraying that person, that’s not an act. It’s not my dialogue. But those are my emotions. Those are my feelings.” She adds, “I don’t need people to like my characters that I play. I need people to be willing to understand where my characters are coming from. I’m in the business of emotions and feelings and how I can make people feel less alone. That’s my job.”
She opens her striking blue eyes. “Even if they don’t like my character—like, they can hate me—my goal in every performance is for somebody to get some kind of physical reaction. Whether it’s you’re moving forward in your chair, whether you’re getting uncomfortable. Maybe you’re blushing. Maybe you’re doing a grossed-out face. The shitty things are actually going to be the most endearing things, in a weird way. I don’t need to look perfect. I think if there is somewhat of a mess onscreen, what is your instinct to do with a mess? Your instinct is to reach out and touch it and fix it.”
Howe compares Garner to Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis. Moore reaches for Philip Seymour Hoffman: “He never did the same performance twice, and was totally transformative.”
Allan Hamitouche
Dress, Balenciaga Couture.
Another icon who’s influenced Garner is Madonna, the patron saint of reinvention, who approved Garner to play her in her much-anticipated biopic. It’s no wonder why—Garner doesn’t just have a young Madonna’s cropped blond hair, she has a similar New York intensity. Every now and then, however, there’s fresh news that the film is dead. In fact, there’s been so much backstage gossip that it proved irresistible to Seth Rogen’s Hollywood satire The Studio, which built a storyline out of its fictional company, Continental, trying to get the biopic made. So Garner hasn’t played Madonna yet, but this year, she did get to spend a few weeks in Venice, playing a fictional version of herself along with Madonna. So how was it?
“It was beyond! I always say it’s fine with the Italian queen!” Garner says, beaming. “It was incredible. I’ve never had an experience like that. Food’s terrible, by the way. I had some of the worst Italian food in my life. But Venice is incredible.” Garner, who’s delighted to be on casual texting terms with Madonna, says, “She’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Like actually. And people don’t know that.”
She also says the rumors of the Madonna biopic’s death have been greatly exaggerated. “I think the movie has to get made,” she says with a wry smile. “But we’ll see….”
If the film does happen, one thing is certain: She won’t play Madge safe. Garner will choose fun hell every time. “I just want to keep taking risks. I think that’s what’s going to resonate with people with my performances. That I gave everything, you know?”
Garner smiles, then paraphrases Caroline: “You’ve got to go all in. Always all in.”
Lead Image: Dress, Schiaparelli Couture.
Hair by David Harborow at MA+ Group; makeup by Jenna Kuchera; manicure by Joanna Memmi; set design by Chloe Barriere; produced by Town Productions.
This story appears in the October 2026 issue of ELLE.