Julia Fox on Life as an Icon: ‘I’ve Just Been Me This Entire Time’

There is an uncooperative bird in Julia Fox’s backyard. On this beautiful Friday of Labor Day weekend, the creature seems to pipe up anytime either one of us starts to talk. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Fox says, faux annoyed. “We have to bring my cats out here and give it the scare of a lifetime.” Then she roars to demonstrate. 

When the happy chirping of a bird isn’t intruding on our interview (fair play, we’re in its natural habitat, not the other way around), the intermittent eardrum-shattering drill of nearby construction is. “We’re trying to do a nice girlie thing out here in our cute Wonderland garden,” Fox says, rolling her eyes, “and there we go — 5:30 on a Friday on a holiday weekend.”

It would all be annoying if it didn’t feel so funny, so New York and (to quote Charli XCX’s It Girl anthem ‘360’) so Julia. A veteran of the art and fashion scene — and now the star of Universal Pictures’ ‘Him’ (in theaters Sept. 19) — Fox first captured national attention in 2019’s ‘Uncut Gems’ opposite Adam Sandler. She hasn’t let it go since. 

The vibe is wonderfully chaotic but also totally fine, expected almost, as we sit in the overgrown loveliness of Fox’s NYC oasis. I wonder out loud whether the interruptions are potentially the work of her house ghost, Beauty, who Fox says has inhabited the space for longer than she has and who I worry might not like strangers lurking. “We’ll have to see,” Fox responds. “A pipe may break tomorrow, and that’ll be her way of saying, ‘Absolutely not.’” But, she adds, Beauty is used to guests: “There’s always a lot of people here; it’s a revolving door. But it’s for the most part good people, like, no bad apples.”

That’s by design. Fox, 35, purchased the brownstone in 2023 with her best friend, photographer Richie Shazam (who shot her cover story!), and they live here together with Fox’s son, Valentino, 4, and Shazam’s partner, Ben Draghi. The home is the diametric opposite of the anarchic, often abusive milieus of Fox’s childhood and adolescence (in Italy and NYC), which were populated by apples ranging from mediocre to rotten and reflected a general lack of stability that included addiction and periods of being unhoused.

“This is my dream life — having a home I bought with my best friend from childhood,” she says, one where the fridge is stocked and there’s no yelling or violence. “We have a child in the house and animals and it’s messy. But it’s warm and it’s colorful and there’s art everywhere and music playing and it always smells like food because someone’s always cooking. That’s the dream I always dreamt. It wasn’t so much being famous or being a star — that just happened. This is what I actively worked toward.”

In fact, Fox was the last person to know she was headed for fame. “A lot of people saw it coming more than I did,” she says. “There was a lot of, like… ‘We always knew you were gonna be famous,’” to which she would reply, “‘No, I’m not. Like, shut up.’”

I ask how she spends most of her time at home: “Domestic labor, babe,” she says. “Cooking, cleaning, bath time, playing — lots of playing — dancing, sports, art… It’s always something, but then at the end of the night, we all get to watch a movie together, and it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, I worked all day for this moment, yay.’” Though Fox may look like the coolest kid at the table, her life structure is an update of that treasured American convention, the nuclear family — and her version is one she hopes more people will choose, “especially right now, where there is just so much hostility toward women.” 

Being in Fox’s home is like being at a very hip, very laid-back friend’s. There is a crush of footwear near the entryway (it’s a shoes-off house). Valentino scuttles up the stairs. Friends and collaborators (they’re rarely one or the other) shuffle in and out of rooms. The space functions as a sort of collective or commune, a bit how I picture Warhol’s Factory, but more low-key. It is grand but not fancy, clearly a place where people actually live, not a look-but-don’t-touch showpiece. 

“The movies and all the amazing things I do are like, Wow,” she says, “but it doesn’t hit in the same way as the little things. I know people are probably rolling their eyes, but love is important, friendship is important, family is important. Money comes and goes and opportunities come and go. You could be an It Girl this season, and next season you’re nobody. So you have to make sure there are things that do stay forever.” 

The quiet quaintness of Fox’s life may surprise those who know her only from her outrageous wardrobe or preternaturally cool clique of celeb friends, which includes Madonna and Paris Hilton. And, oh, yeah, there’s the growing résumé; She guests on the CBS hit ‘Elsbeth’ this season (as a “grief influencer”!), but right now, she’s in the Netflix film ‘Night Always Comes’ alongside Vanessa Kirby and soon to be seen in her first studio movie, “Him,” a football horror flick directed by Justin Tipping and produced by Jordan Peele. She plays Elsie White, the mysterious and possibly sinister wife of an athlete (Marlon Wayans) at the end of his career. When I ask about the filming experience, that, too, comes back to the feeling of home: “We bonded like a little family unit, because we were all in New Mexico for quite a while,” she recalls. “Sometimes on set there will be people who are a little weird, but on this set, everyone was amazing. Even though the movie’s so scary, the filming process wasn’t giving that at all.”

When I ask Fox what she thinks the public’s misconceptions about her might be, she says she suspects people think she’s superficial or crazy — “or that I do drugs or party a lot” — when in reality, she says, she’s very down-to-earth. “Sometimes I see stuff and I’m just like, Wow. If only you knew. I wish I was that exciting and interesting. I’m very much a mom; my life revolves around my child and doing child-centered activities. I’m not this raging party girl that I think people think I am. Sorry. I wish I was, though.” Mostly, she doesn’t really care what people think of her: “I’ve just been me this entire time,” she says. If people think otherwise, “that’s their business.”

Anyone who read her 2023 memoir, ‘Down the Drain,’ would know that although, yes, she was a wild child, those days are behind her. She chalks up people’s inability to conceive of her evolution as a misogynistic lack of imagination. “There’s people that just, you know, hate women and hate anyone who’s different or doesn’t conform, or doesn’t live to please the male gaze,” she says. “They get offended. That does something to their ego and the way they were raised to believe women should exist. So I’m happy to shatter that for them. If I want to look crazy and put on an unflattering outfit that I think is cool, don’t take it personally. It’s gonna be OK. You’ll survive it. You’ll make it out alive.”

The patriarchy and sexism are ever-present themes, which I imagine impacts the way she parents her son. “You just need to raise your boys the same way you raise your girls. We put so much more pressure on our girls, and we fill their heads with so much more cautionary tales,” she says. “You need to be teaching them that they can grow up and their fists can be weapons.” You also need to have difficult conversations, she says, even when your kid is only 4. “We were watching a movie, and this guy comes out wearing a wedding dress. [Valentino] was like, ‘Mommy, why is he wearing a dress?’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Well, Uncle Ben wears dresses. If I wore a suit, would that be weird?’ And I saw the wheels turning.”

It’s exhausting but important work, she admits: “Sometimes I’m just like, ‘Do I really have to do this?’ But no, I do because God forbid he goes out into the world and becomes the exact epitome of everything I hate because I was just like, ‘It’ll be fine.’ As soon as they start making those remarks, we have to start deconstructing that.”

Though most of the responsibility falls to her, she says, Fox coparents with her ex-husband, Peter Artemiev, and right now, they’re “in a good patch. In a couple months, he might do something and then we’re not anymore, but compared to a lot of other coparenting situations, mine’s heaven.” 

There have been times when her past conflicts with Artemiev played out on social media, and I ask if she ever worries that she’s overshared with her nearly 2 million followers. The answer is no, never. “In the moment when I do it, it’s about me just being like, ‘Hell, yeah,’ like, whatever. And then it always ends up being super therapeutic for me and my community. It always ends up being the way to connect with people.” It’s also the truest representation of who she is. “I’m not better than anybody. I go through the same petty-ass s**t we’re all going through,” she says. “I can see how maybe some people in the public sphere want to maintain the optics of not being messy, but that was just never my brand. I am messy, and I love mess, and if there is a messy opportunity to be had, I’m gonna seize it. You did me wrong, and now I have to protect your dirt? Like, no. If you don’t want me to talk about it, don’t do it.”

Fox has lived many lives in her 35 years, and the things left to do are mostly creative: She wants to write a second book; she wants to direct; she wants to do Broadway, ideally in a new, original play. She wants to act in the films of artists she loves, like Greta Gerwig and Yorgos Lanthimos (‘Poor Things’) and Zach Cregger (‘Weapons’). Some days she thinks she wants 10 kids, other days one is plenty. And her dating life? Zero, she says, before adding, “No offense to you, that’s such an annoying question.” 

Which is all to say, she’s good. She’s created the life that she wants, and she has everything she needs right here. “I’m a grown-up. I’m an adult. For a long time, I would say yes to everything because I was a people-pleaser and I didn’t want to have FOMO or miss an opportunity. Now I don’t have the fear of missing out, I have the fear of being invited. I just like to be home. That’s really what keeps me sane.”