“In my personal life, I’m not having, like, crazy-wild sex,” Julia Fox, the actress, said the other day. She was walking up the steps of Our Lady of Pompeii, a church in the West Village. “I prefer a great conversation, or a great meal, but people think I’m, like, this sex goddess. It must be because I never treated it like a hush-hush thing. It’s a necessary bodily function!” In the church, she crossed herself in a practiced but casual motion. Fox, who lives in the East Village, with her five-month-old son, Valentino—“It’s so hard, and the sleeping is scarce, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything”—was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, and had her brown hair pulled back. Her lush eyelashes gave the dressed-down look a touch of va-va-voom. “I used to come here to pray, but I haven’t been in, like, ten years,” she went on, settling into a pew. “I still pray a lot. I always say, ‘You have to pray and then wait two weeks, because the universe has a two-week lead time.’ ”
Julia Fox
Julia FoxIllustration by João Fazenda

Fox, who is thirty-one, is largely known for her role in Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2019 crime thriller, “Uncut Gems,” her first real acting job, in which she starred as a hotheaded, kindhearted bombshell, mistress to Adam Sandler’s jewelry-store owner. “Everyone was surprised I was able to act,” she said.

A career as an actress was not a foregone conclusion for Fox, who was born in a small town outside Milan—her mother is Italian—and was sent to New York City to live with her American father, a contractor, when she was in the first grade. Her childhood was itinerant and tumultuous. “I went to, like, six different high schools,” she said. “I finished school just to prove a point to people. Everything I’ve ever achieved was motivated by that. Like, this is for the haters.” She laughed, the sound rising above the piped-in church music. “We stayed at whatever apartment my dad was renovating at the time. We were, like, homeless.” She went on, “I’d go live at friends’ houses—it was always some sort of dysfunctional family with a single mom, and I’d find my way in, and my dad didn’t care.”

An older sister in one of those households worked as a dominatrix. “She would look at herself in the mirror, with the fish-nets and the PVC and the platforms,” Fox said. “And, in the back of my mind, I always knew it was an option.” In her last year of high school, she said, “I answered a Craigslist ad, when they still had the adult section, and I biked over after school and got the job.” A long-term romantic relationship with a wealthy older man, a client, followed. “I used to pray all the time that a guy would come in and take me away, and then it happened,” she said. “We were together for five years. He wanted me to marry him, and I loved him so much, but he wanted me to wear, like, Ralph Lauren Purple Label and Tory Burch. I felt like I was always playing a part.” Fox was struggling with heroin and pill addiction (she’s now sober), and she broke off the relationship. She joined a hard-partying downtown scene and published a couple of art books. “A lot of stuff about abuse and addiction and sex work,” she said. “It felt good to pull this veil off my life. Sure, it was bad, but it’s not, like, the worst.”

Fox decided to light a candle for a friend who had overdosed. “After she died, I vowed, I’m never going to get high again, in her honor,” she said. “Oh, these aren’t even real candles!” she exclaimed, seeing that the system was electric. “I’m not putting in a dollar for this! It’s a ripoff!” She changed her mind and slipped a bill into the donation box anyway.

This month, Fox appears in “No Sudden Move,” Steven Soderbergh’s nineteen-fifties noir, on HBO Max, as a scheming housewife. “It was hard to be a woman then,” she said. “She’s always going to be someone’s wife or girlfriend—she’s never going to have a career. So if she wants to kill a few assholes, let her!” Stepping out of the church, she pointed down the street. “I lived on Bleecker and Thompson in high school,” she said. “It was right between my school and the dominatrix dungeon, so it was really easy to go back and forth.” ♦