‘I could give my last breath and it wouldn’t be enough’: Julia Fox on the cost of fame

Once upon a time, in a small town in Italy, a little girl named Julia Francesca Fox was raised by her mother and grandfather. Being Italian, perhaps, you might imagine that somewhere in her DNA sits Italy’s unique legacy of horror cinema: the wild and shocking works of filmmakers such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato and Riccardo Freda.

“A little bit,” admits Fox, now an accomplished American actress, model and author who has stepped into the Jordan Peele-produced, Justin Tipping-directed horror film Him. “I think a lot of the religious undertones and a lot of that imagery is so rooted in Catholicism, so I think that [horror] definitely has some roots there.”

As a child, she learned the power of prayer, Fox says, when I ask about the toolbox of the working actress. “That’s something that I’ve definitely taken with me from my childhood. We prayed every single night before bed, and I still find myself doing that.”

What makes Him such a compelling work, perhaps, is the way it bends the horror genre, while also juggling many of its tropes. It is, at times, almost overwhelming in a visual sense. I am no prude - I was raised on everything from Salem’s Lot and The Omen, to Braindead, Suspiria and Cannibal Holocaust - but there were moments where I looked away.

The film follows an emerging football star, Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers), who is sent to train at the remote desert compound of an iconic football legend, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Fox plays Isaiah’s wife, Elsie, a social media influencer who seems to rule the outlandish social world within the compound.

There is no shortage of visual, visceral horror tropes in the film, but in many ways it is an innovative and quite unpredictable entry in the horror genre. The film ambitiously unpicks a kind of human horror: the meat machine of the professional sports world, and the manner in which men’s bodies are broken and rebuilt for it.

“A lot of that speaks to the performances,” Fox says. “Marlon played that so well, and so did Tyriq, that the feeling of being the GOAT, the price of greatness and the sacrifice that goes into it in sports, that is physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. That is something that I think a lot of people can sympathise with.

“We see it so often in even our celebrities and how some of them eventually kind of just lose their mind entirely,” Fox adds. “So if fame was this amazing thing, then why are our celebrities losing their minds? But still, fame is a highly aspirational thing and is really viewed with these rose-coloured glasses as this amazing blessing. And it is in some ways for sure, but like everything else, it has its downsides.”

Fox’s ascendancy into the cultural space has seen her navigate the worlds of fashion design, modelling, painting, and now acting. She also self-published two books of photography, and in 2017 created an exhibition of art titled RIP Julia Fox, which featured silk canvases painted with her own blood. Last year, she released an autobiography, Down the Drain.

“At first fame was really fun, for sure,” Fox tells me, when I ask about the difficulties of navigating life in the spotlight. “It’s like, woo, I’m here, and you want to give, give, give, give, give. And then at a certain point I think you realise like, oh wait, I could literally give my last dying breath and it still wouldn’t be enough, they’d still want more.”

It is important too, she says, “knowing that [there are] some things you can keep for yourself. It’s so important, I think, to have a private life and I never understood that before, but I understand it now… because otherwise it feels like you’re just up for consumption and with that, it’s just not healthy.”

Looking at the fame of others, such as Justin Bieber, “where he can’t ever go outside, and he’s always fighting with the paparazzi, and when I see that, my heart breaks for him. This man just wants to go outside and be left alone. He’s not asking for the world here, I wouldn’t even call it a luxury.

“I can go outside and be left alone, you can go outside and be left alone, and he can’t,” Fox adds. “So I think there are levels to fame for sure, and I would never want to be at that level. That just looks like a prison of some sort, like a nice gilded cage, a prison with a lot of amenities, but a prison nonetheless.”

One of the lines in Him - that “this story is the story of America” - seems to position the film as a sort of polemic on America itself.

“Everything is inherently political, down to our clothes, to the media we consume, you’re either woke to it or you’re not, but everything is and ultimately, I think football is the story of America in a way,” she says.

“That struggle of, is the ball mine, is the ball yours, that power struggle I feel like that’s very much alive today as well, where it’s like we can’t all just be on the same team, it always has to be us against them. It’s designed that way to keep us separated because if we were to realise that we were all on the same team, we’d overthrow the government.”

Writing her book was a cathartic experience, she says. “If anything, it was more of just a release. And coming clean, being honest, having the humility to be honest, and also being fair.

“As the narrator, you have to be fair in how you tell the story and having to be honest when you were the villain and when you were the victim,” Fox adds. “So I just tried my best to do that and be a fair and reliable and honest and truthful narrator. But ultimately for the goal of release, [was] lightening the load a little bit.”

I ask her whether, as an actor, sometimes in the makeup chair as you become a character, the reflected image at some point stops being you, and becomes something else. Versions of you also exist on movie posters and billboards. So what is her sense of the girl in the mirror, the girl on the poster, the girl on the billboard? In this situation, who is she?

When we meet, Fox is stylishly dressed and impeccably groomed. A brunette today. Focused and very business-like. It’s a universe away from her performance as Elsie, a bleached blonde wild child alternately using clothes as armour and unleashing her sensuality.

In that sense, it is a true performance because the two women I have met - the character on screen, and the woman who played her - seem a universe apart. That said, Elsie looks much like Fox did when she turned up to the set; Tipping resisted her attempts to make her character more fully transformed.

“But I think that ultimately, whether it’s the girl in the poster or the girl in the mirror … it’s like, it’s all just me,” Fox says. “That’s it. It’s really not as deep. It really is all just whatever little sliver of myself I’m amplifying in that moment. We’re all very multidimensional human beings, especially women. We can wear many, many, many hats and make it look effortless. So, I think they’re all just me.”

Him is in cinemas from October 2.

Must-see movies, interviews and all the latest from the world of film delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our Screening Room newsletter.