If Julia Garner could be blessed with one superpower, she would choose invisibility. “I like to hide,” says the self-described “outgoing introvert” on a Zoom call from London. “I recharge by being by myself.” The 31-year-old arrived in the British capital the day before, but she’s already completed back-to-back press days for the premiere of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, getting fitted into a shimmering Thom Browne gown hours before walking the red carpet. By tomorrow, Garner will be back across the pond to resume filming Netflix’s limited series The Altruists, about the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which she’s also executive-producing—followed shortly by the promotion for another film, the horror thriller Weapons.
In other words, for the foreseeable future, Garner will have no place to hide.
While the New York native’s whirlwind summer would strain the most social of creatures, Garner appears unfazed—and seems to be savoring the chaos, even—as she slips into a cozy walnut brown sweater and downs a chocolate bar for sustenance at the start of our interview. “They’re champagne problems,” says the Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning actor, with a knowing smile that tacitly acknowledges her good fortune.
Chaos, incidentally, is a running theme in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest film in the tentpole franchise. Garner’s character, Shalla-Bal, aka the Silver Surfer, is forced into servitude to Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds, who must consume entire planets in order to survive. The Silver Surfer traverses the cosmos searching for celestial bodies Galactus can destroy, delivering the bad news to the doomed planets’ inhabitants. (In the comic books, Shalla-Bal is not the Silver Surfer but, rather, the Silver Surfer’s star-crossed lover.)
Garner was unceremoniously thrust into this new universe the very moment she arrived on set. “All the people from Marvel were there,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Julia.’ Then I had to climb on a crane, and the crane went 30 feet up in the air.” The scene Garner shot that day shows the Silver Surfer landing in Times Square to inform the Fantastic Four and a fear-stricken crowd that the end is near. “I’m on the edge of a surfboard with a harness on, I’m wearing a helmet with a GoPro in front of 300 extras, and I’m getting direction from an earpiece. I don’t know how I didn’t flop that. I think I convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal—I just, like, disassociated,” she says, then rests her chin delicately in her hands. (Beyond her shock of platinum curls, it’s this gesture of Garner’s that uncannily evokes club-era Madonna, leaving little doubt as to why Garner has been tapped to play the pop legend in the official biopic.)
The Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman remembers the crane moment a little differently—500 extras instead of 300, and no first-day jitters. “She was terrifying as Shalla-Bal,” he says. “But beneath the heralding of doom, there was an empathy and humanity, and you could see that transition happening in her performance as she looked down at the people below shivering in terror. That really paved the way for the rest of the movie.”
Admirers of Garner’s résumé, packed as it is with prestige television and acclaimed indie film credits, may view her appearance in a superhero movie as a radical departure, but according to Jason Bateman, Garner’s Ozark costar and a friend whom she often turns to for industry guidance, the move makes perfect sense. “As much as they get criticized for being overly popcorn, these films have consistently included fancy folks,” he says. “Whether it’s choosing directors or casting a villain, they’re always reaching for people who signal a deeper sort of creativity.”
The “fancy folks” Bateman is talking about are, of course, the entertainers dedicated to craft, and it’s no secret that Garner ranks high among them. During the recent SAG-AFTRA strike, she decamped to Paris to attend clown school—the famed École Philippe Gaulier, whose alumni include Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter. Before landing her breakout role as Ruth Langmore on Ozark, Garner devised ways to hone her acting skills even when work was scarce. “I was auditioning all the time and not booking anything,” she says. “So I thought, What can I work on? What can I have in my back pocket?”
With a coach, Garner learned the basics of every accent in the English language. (No big deal—in America alone, there are about 30 dialects.) “It was actually really convenient, because by the time Ozark happened, I knew how to do a Southern accent,” she says. That preparation paid off again when she was cast as the heiress impostor Anna Delvey in Shonda Rhimes’s Inventing Anna, in which Garner’s interpretation of Delvey’s unique Russian-German-wealthy-Manhattanite patois demonstrated a Meryl Streep–type mastery that helped her win a Golden Globe.
Keeping journals for every character, while in character, is another technique Garner has practiced faithfully over the years. Of Shalla-Bal, who persuades Galactus to spare her home planet in exchange for her fealty, Garner says, “There’s a quite complex and tragic story with her. A lot of suppressed emotion. So I wrote things down that bothered her, especially earlier in her life. And then I suppressed them again.”
Miu Miu dress, bra, and stole.
Garner grew up in a family of artists. “They’re all more interesting than me,” she says. “They’re great storytellers.” Her mother, Tamar Gingold, was raised in a Jewish household that valued traditional career paths. “She was born an artist, but her family were scientists and they just didn’t get it,” says Garner. Because of that, Gingold, an actor-comedian turned psychoanalyst, and Garner’s father, Thomas, a painter and art teacher, went “the opposite way” when parenting her and her older sister, Anna. That gave Garner more than just freedom and independence—it gave her an early confidence in her own taste and point of view.
Take, for example, her natural curls. “There were all these girls who straightened their hair in middle school,” she says. “They would have, like, curly roots and straight ends. I knew they looked worse than how I looked, so I wasn’t even going to bother. People want so bad to be cool. They’re doing things because they want to be perceived a certain way, or because that’s the most popular thing to do. And I’m like, Fuck popularity.”
Garner is referring not only to her childhood memories but to how much time her generation spends documenting their lives for social media, a phenomenon that, despite her millennial status, didn’t shape her formative years. “When I was a teenager in New York, if you took out your BlackBerry in the club or at a bar and took a photo, you looked like a loser,” she says. While Garner has an Instagram account, she uses it primarily to post work-related updates. After the release of the first Fantastic Four trailer, the scene of the Silver Surfer landing in Times Square—the one she shot her first day on set, suspended 30 feet in the air—went viral on TikTok, but Garner couldn’t even access the videos because she refuses to download the app.
When she’s not on location or traversing the globe promoting two projects at once, Garner lives a “pretty simple” life. Ironically, the city kid who took the subway by herself to get to school and who retains a New Yorker’s street smarts—“Oh, there’s a weirdo walking right behind me; I’m gonna pretend to wave to someone and cross the street”—now happily resides in Los Angeles’s sleepy San Fernando Valley with her husband of six years, the musician Mark Foster.
Suburban life, and the disturbances threatening its placid uniformity from within, is the subject of Weapons, in which an entire class of schoolchildren, save one, suddenly vanishes one night. The blame for the children’s disappearance initially falls on their teacher, Justine, whom Garner embodies with the captivating blend of steeliness and vulnerability that fans of her work have come to expect. The horror film, which has its absurdist, comedic moments, happens to feature two Marvel veterans: Benedict Wong plays Andrew, the beleaguered school principal; and Josh Brolin is Archer Graff, father to one of the missing kids. Brolin signed on to play the emotionally bereft Archer and to executive-produce the film after learning that Garner was attached. “Ozark was one of the last shows that I actually obsessed over,” he tells me by phone from Santa Barbara. “And she was the best thing about it.”
Gucci dress.
When asked what it is about Garner that enables her to bring the same complexity to the characters she plays across different genres, Brolin—whose own 40-year career has been wide-ranging, to say the least—is plainspoken: “It’s an embarrassing profession, because the perception is that you’re on some perpetual red carpet, waving at people your entire life, even when you go to the bathroom. But real actors like Julia, and the people I know who have lasted in this profession, have an innate obsession over the human condition that they can’t let go of.”
Weapons director Zach Cregger echoes Brolin’s sentiments. “Her brain explodes with a thousand ideas when she brings a character to life, from wardrobe to inflection to dialogue. She cares about the art. You know she dropped everything to go to France to get reamed by, like, some old French clown genius?” he asks, with a mixture of admiration and disbelief.
Garner uses more delicate language to describe that experience, but she acknowledges that studying with Philippe Gaulier did teach her a welcome lesson in humility. Though talk of Garner’s superpowers—both Shalla-Bal’s and her own—may follow her wherever she goes, she remains more interested in what it means to be human. “It’s about not being afraid to fail,” she says. “People are always obsessed with winning, but I think that’s a mistake. If you want to win, you’ve got to be open to failure.”
Hair by Guido for Zara Hair; makeup by Pat McGrath for Pat McGrath Labs; manicure by Jin Soon Choi for JINsoon Beauty at Home Agency.
Production credits throughout cover stories: Produced by PRODn; producers: Steven Dam, Wesley Torrance, Stephanie Ge, Mitch Baker; Steven Meisel Studio manager: Ruk Richards; Steven Meisel Studio art director: Paulie Browne; photo assistants: Jeremy Hall, John Griffith, Alex Hopkins, Jeremy Gould, Alex Johnstone; digital technician: Kevin Lavallade; retouching: Gloss Studio; fashion assistants: Caroline Hampton, Adrian Reyna, Raquel Castellanos; production assistants: Daniel Weiner, Aaron Pimentel, Noah Conboy, Torrance Hall, Sierra Sky, Sean English; hair colorist for Julia Garner: Lena Ott; manicure assistants: Christina Mallett, Elena Leger; tailor: Raul Zevallos at R-Zee Tailoring.
