Julia Garner has said her portrayal of Caroline Ellison in the Netflix series The Altruists was built through intense attention to detail, particularly the eyes of the woman at the centre of the FTX scandal.
Ellison was the business partner and girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, whose cryptocurrency exchange collapsed after a multi-billion-dollar fraud. Garner said she studied photographs closely as she prepared to play the role.
“You can tell a lot with somebody’s eyes,” she said. “I look at photos, I obsess over photos. This sounds so crazy, but I’ll cover half of their face and I’ll just focus on their eyes.”
Garner, who is known for markedly different performances, said she wanted to disappear into the character rather than see herself on screen.
“I really didn’t want to recognise myself, like, at all,” she said. “That’s my goal.”
Julia Garner on finding confidence through failure
The 32-year-old actress grew up in Riverdale in the Bronx, where she attended arts and crafts classes near her parents’ home. Her father is an art teacher, while her mother was an actress who became a therapist.
Garner has described herself as “deathly shy” as a child. She attended her first acting class at 14 and said performing offered protection while she struggled with learning difficulties and felt like an outcast.
“Now when I look at my childhood, I think I was acting my whole life,” she said. “Acting always protected me.”
Her first film role came at 16, in Martha Marcy May Marlene. She later became widely recognised as Ruth Langmore, a quick-witted criminal operator, in the Netflix series Ozark, a performance that earned her a Golden Globe and three Emmy Awards.
“My life was so different before ‘Ozark’,” Garner said. The role, she added, taught her “not to be so scared”, although it also led to a succession of parts as “the most unhinged people”.
She went on to receive another Golden Globe nomination for playing Anna Sorokin in Inventing Anna, about the woman who deceived New York society into believing she was a German heiress.
But the growing attention unsettled her. “I just didn’t like the feeling of being watched all the time and it kind of got to my head,” she said.
During the actors’ strike in 2023, Garner enrolled in a clown school in France. She said she failed repeatedly, but found the experience liberating.
A teacher told her she was hiding and felt ashamed, challenging her to allow him to see her eyes. Garner said the lesson was “not being afraid to fail” and that she was still searching for her “inner clown”.
“Well, I have a clown certificate!” she joked.
Garner’s planned Madonna role
Garner has also been chosen by Madonna to play the singer in a biopic, although the project has since been shelved and its future remains uncertain.
The audition required her to sing, dance and act as Madonna, despite Garner not being a trained dancer. She said she would love the film to be made, but added that she had formed a close friendship with the singer.
Whether playing Ellison or Madonna, Garner said her ambition was to surprise herself and move audiences rather than simply reproduce her own personality on screen.
“How am I going to affect people? How am I gonna make people feel less alone?” she said. “That’s the beauty of, you know, good acting.”
