JULIA

Hollywood's quiet achiever Julia Garner is making a career of defying genre

- ALEXANDRA ENGLISH

It’s a beautiful image, the opening shot of this story. Julia Garner standing in a field of tall grass, a bouquet of wild daisies in her hand and the sunlight gently illuminating her skin. Her soft blonde curls dance on the breeze, and her yellow boho revival Gucci blouse billows with the wind. It’s light and romantic; it could be a fragrance ad (Gucci Bloom, perhaps?). But the vision it conjures is in stark contrast to the reason we’re here: to talk about her new jump-out-of-your-skin scary supernatural gothic horror film, Wolf Man.

That Garner can do both – channel fear and romance for the same project – is testament to her skill as one of her generation’s most chameleonic actors. There’s been no better display of that than when she simultaneously played a gun-wielding foul-mouthed 19-year-old with a deep Southern accent in Ozark and a fake heiress high-society scammer whose pretend German accent was tainted by both Russian and English (the British and the Gossip Girl kind).

It’s the latter accent that Garner is speaking in while we shoot, entertaining the marie claire crew with her perfect impression of Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin), who she played in the 2022 series Inventing Anna. That Garner could not only pull off that delicate and “consistently inconsistent” accent at the time but also whip it out years later, shows how deeply Garner’s roles settle into her bones. “I don’t even like to call them characters,” she says of the real and fictional women she plays. “They’re people who you meet who have a significant part in your life; they never leave you.”