

And he’s charming and manipulative and so is she.” But with Julia, he doesn’t feel that way – they’re both able to be vulnerable with each other. When you’re addicted to something like gambling and you’re always ripping off everyone and everyone is just an opportunity, it makes you feel kind of alone. “They’re both broken people who feel alone in the world. Some viewers have wondered how anyone could put up with the manic, spectacularly irresponsible lowlife that Sandler portrays in the film, but Fox can understand what Julia sees in Howard Ratner. “He just really lightened the mood and made the experience so fun and not intimidating. It helped that Sandler, playing against type – ie not playing a man-boy in a goofy comedy – seemed a little anxious too. “I think we’re going to be lifelong friends.” “We were both first -time actors, so we had that bond,” Fox says of Garnett. She enjoyed working with Canadian R&B megastar the Weeknd, with whom she shares an intimate scene in a nightclub, and retired basketball giant Kevin Garnett, whose obsession with an Ethiopian black opal sends Howard, and the film, into overdrive.
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“I just felt like I was making a movie with my friends.” Given the Safdies’ penchant for shooting on the hoof, without permits where possible, it would figure if the production had been stressful too, but according to Fox it was easy and fun.
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Some early viewers of Uncut Gems, which follows Sandler’s character through a series of increasingly high-stakes gambles, have compared it to a cocaine rush one critic for Variety described the film as “a protracted heart attack”. “I only slept one hour the night before, but it kind of helped, because in the scene Julia hasn’t slept – she went out partying and didn’t come to work on time – and everyone loved it.
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“I was nervous the first day because I was like: what if I tricked all these people into thinking I can do this, and then they yell ‘action!’, and I have no idea how to act?” she says. She secured the part, though it took her a while to settle. But I do love karaoke and Josh thought I would really shine.” “Singing in public is already kind of nerve-racking. “I was really nervous about that,” she says. To convince the studios of Fox’s rightness for the role, they got her to do a scene with Sandler at a New York department store – “We were arguing over a dress he was buying me: I wanted the more expensive, better dress and he wanted the cheaper, not-as-nice dress” – and a karaoke scene where she sang Wicked Game by Chris Isaak. It’s what attracted the Safdies to her, this mix of assertiveness and vulnerability. I think it’s what makes me an interesting person.” “I do really well in social situations, but I have a tendency to isolate. “I’m kind of an extroverted introvert,” she says. But she can be sweetly self-doubting too, confessing to nerves on set and berating herself for playing it safe when she made her chat-show debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last month. This unabashed way of talking about herself, verging on brash, seems characteristic of Fox, who later in our conversation declares that, at 28, she has outgrown New York, which she describes as a “small town”. “Being independent, resilient, being a hustler, having a ride-or-die mentality, and overall just being really cute”: these qualities, says Fox, were shared by both Julias. Not all aspects of the character were identical – Fox had never worked as a Diamond District shop assistant, nor had she used her seductive powers to get famous musicians to buy jewellery – but the parallels were clear. I think at one point I even heard Kim Kardashian, though I never asked because I didn’t want to put myself in an uncomfortable position where I would be obsessing over it and doing the compare-and-contrast thing.”īut she was determined to make the role her own. I heard Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson. “They auditioned about 300 girls,” says Fox. But this production was much bigger than before, with heavyweight producers on board including Martin Scorsese and Scott Rudin, and the brothers were under pressure to find a bigger name. The fact that she had never acted before didn’t bother the Safdies, who enjoy casting first-timers in their films. As as result, when Uncut Gems finally came around, Fox’s claim on the role had become tentative. But the Safdies’ profile was raised by 2014’s harrowing Heaven Knows What, and then went sky-high after they released the thriller Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson, in 2017 (the New Yorker called it “an instant crime classic in the age of Trump”). “Even in the character description, I was kind of like: ‘ This is a little familiar.’ It was pretty spot-on.”Īt the time, the film kept getting pushed back.

“There were a lot of similarities,” says Fox down the line from Los Angeles.
