Julia Garner doesn’t like to think of what she does as acting, not once the cameras are rolling. “I’m just being at that moment,” she said. “I’m just living it.”
She knows how that sounds. “Super artsy,” she said. “Actory.” She can’t help it. “I always want to act and feel like no one is watching me,” she said.
In life, Garner, 32, doesn’t hide. I’d met up with her at Zitomer’s, a multilevel pharmacy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This was Garner’s suggestion. She’s been a regular since her high school days, and the salesladies swarmed her. “Hi, honey!” one cooed as Garner swept in.
Garner, pointed out a peel she loves, the first grown-up lipstick she bought, then moved onto blinged-out pill cases, bed jackets and furry Russian hats.
“It’s fab in here,” she enthused.
She insisted that I try out a moisturizer with the horrifying name of CelluMoist, and because Garner is sweetly indomitable, I submitted, letting a clerk slather it on. Minutes later I had to wrestle a makeup bag out of Garner’s hand, explaining that our ethics policy prevented her buying it for me. I won. Barely. To be around her, at least on that late summer afternoon, was to be swept up in a very benevolent whirlwind — a twister of zip and warmth and sharp acuity.
I hadn’t expected this. Though Garner’s body of work (“The Americans,” “Ozark,” “The Assistant,” “Weapons”) is unusually varied, none of it implies that she would be a fun hang. But Garner is a transformational actress. By method and by choice she is nothing like the characters she plays.
“When somebody comes along like Julia, who’s beautiful and talented and daring in the way that she is, it feels important,” said Zach Cregger, who directed her in “Weapons,” the buzzy 2025 horror hit. “She just throws herself into all these different roles and is unrecognizable.”
Even out of roles, Garner doesn’t always recognize herself. To me, she seemed distinct, delightfully sui generis. But maybe that was only the Julia of that day, that hour.
“I’m constantly not myself because of my job,” she said, once we’d left the pharmacy and settled into a nearby cafe. “As a person, I’m constantly changing all the time, because I know what it feels like to change all the time.”
Her latest transformation is in “The Altruists,” a Netflix limited series that premieres on Nov. 19. Created by Graham Moore, “The Altruists” describes the spectacular rise and precipitous fall of FTX and Alameda Research, cryptocurrency concerns founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. Garner plays Caroline Ellison, the chief executive of Alameda Research and Bankman-Fried’s off-again-on-again romantic partner. Their relationship — amatory, professional — is depicted as a blockchain folie à deux that ends with both of them imprisoned for crimes including fraud and conspiracy.
You would not think that a person like Garner could disguise her looks easily. With her milky skin, sharp chin, liquid eyes and meringue-like blond curls, she has a delicate, distinct elegance. But the first time Anthony Boyle, who plays Bankman-Fried, saw her fully made up, he mistook her for a background actor.
“It was like a magic trick,” he said. “She was a different person.”
That magic, that sense of not acting but being, is the goal. “I like to become different people,” Garner said. “I am really just trying to completely disappear.”
Garner was raised about 10 miles north of the pharmacy, in Riverdale, a leafy section of the Bronx. The younger child of a psychotherapist, who had once been a comedic actress, and a painter who also taught art, she struggled with learning differences. She remembers acting from a very early age, pretending that she understood things when she couldn’t. The transition to acting class and then to professional roles seemed obvious.
Early on, she went out for teen and tween parts on Nickelodeon series, but she did not get them. Her look and affect were better suited to indies. She had a significant role in the 2011 cult drama “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and a starring one in “Electrick Children,” a coming-of-age film from 2012. Studio executives encouraged her to dye her hair and get veneers, but she resisted.
“I was like, they have no taste,” she recalled.
She entered the mature phase of her career a few years later on the FX series “The Americans,” playing an C.I.A. officer’s daughter, and was a standout on the Netflix rural crime show “Ozark,” as a baby-faced, dirty-mouthed criminal matriarch.
In these roles and elsewhere, there was a sense of risk in her performances, a heightened emotional intensity or an uncanny remove. Garner described herself as drawn to extremes.
“If I read something and I’m not scared to do it, I just don’t do it,” she said.
She also lends her characters a sense of unpredictability, an aliveness, which she ascribes in part to her experience of childhood epilepsy, never knowing when the next seizure would come. “There is something about that that forces you to be present,” she said.
Garner has an unusual approach to acting. When preparing a role, she invites a character in. “I literally can physically feel when I’m leaving and having another person coming,” she said. “It sounds so crazy.”
The character of Caroline came in from pretty far away. Ellison was a math prodigy; Garner failed math. Ellison is emotionally illiterate; Garner is an emotional whiz. They look nothing alike. But Garner saw “The Altruists” as an opportunity for complete transformation.
“I just wanted to see how far I could go,” she said.
This was why Moore wanted her, too. “Julia is such a high diver,” he said. “She will choose to jump from the highest platform into the deepest water.” Even he was surprised at Garner’s push for physical transformation — colored contacts, facial prosthetics, a wig system, which meant more than two hours each day in the makeup trailer.
Unlike Anna Sorokin, whom Garner played in the Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” Ellison declined a request to meet. From the few videos of her available, Garner roughed out a gawky walk and a gasping laugh. She moved her voice to a lower register, frayed at the ends, and accelerated her speech.
Boyle, acting opposite her, admired her ability to combine this immersion in the role with the practicality a shoot demands. “She treads that line of being able to call on genius and be possessed by it at will and also be in reality,” he said.
It can take Garner weeks (and a lot of bed rotting) to come back to herself after a shoot. She rests, reconnects with friends and family, experiences art, engages in everyday life.
“I have to make sure to feed my soul, as corny as that sounds,” she said. “Feed my soul as a human. Because I don’t play actresses, I play people.”
I realized only later, playing back the interview, that she had said almost nothing about that offscreen human. She hadn’t seemed evasive at the time. (Of her separation from her husband, the musician Mark Foster, she said simply, “There’s nothing really to talk about.”) And yet her most personal details were about moisturizer. Just now she seems to live for her work. And there’s plenty of it.
She has recently finished filming “Tyrant,” a suspense movie set in the world of fine dining, co-starring Charlize Theron. Garner will next play one half of an adulterous couple in another thriller, “Guilty Creatures.” She has also shot an episode of the Apple TV Hollywood satire “The Studio,” in which she plays “a crazy version of myself,” opposite Madonna. (Garner was cast as Madonna in a biopic, which remains mired in development.)
I was reminded of something Moore had said, that if you tried to draw a through line linking Garner’s various roles, you would end up with a series of cartoon squiggles. But “The Studio” aside, she has almost never played a character who is happy or at ease or has even half the exuberance and impishness that she displayed that afternoon.
Maybe she doesn’t see herself that way. Or maybe that’s not the self that she wants to show others. She’d rather become other people, even as that becoming exhausts her. For years she’s been threatening to quit acting. But she knows she won’t.
“I love acting so much,” she said. “I love it. I sometimes hate it, but I love it. I love it even on the worst day. I don’t really know anything else.”
Cinematography by Jesse Bronstein.