'I'm not defined by whether men think I'm hot anymore'

Julia Fox, best known for starring in ‘Uncut Gems’, has just released a shocking new memoir. She talks to Adam White about her drug addiction, sex work, and dating Kanye West

-  Adam White

Sometime after her hit film Uncut Gems, but before she became Kanye West’s six-week fling, Julia Fox decided to reinvent herself. The actor slash writer slash living art project bleached her eyebrows zombie-white, shedded what she calls her “famous curves”, and began dressing scandalously, sometimes scarily, in public. Men – at least the sort who feel it their right to check women out in the street – suddenly stopped gawping. They stopped pawing. They stopped flirting. Finally, she was free.

“I’m not defined by whether men think I’m hot anymore,” the 33-year-old tells me over tea and buttered bread, her voice nasal and sticky. “It’s interesting how men view women as these objects that need to be pretty for them. And they get a chip on their shoulder when they think you, like… could be hot but choose not to be. Like, ‘What’s wrong with this psycho bitch?’” She nibbles, continues. “Men feel inherently entitled to consume your beauty. I’m so done with that. I may not be going out of my way to be as repulsive as possible now, but I’m also not really catering to men at all.”

Almost overnight, in 2019, the Italian-born Fox was transformed from a New York scenester and artist to a Hollywood bombshell for the smartphone age when she was cast in Uncut Gems, Josh and Benny Safdie’s anxiety attack of a thriller. But her true image has always been more Andy Warhol’s Factory than bodycon dresses at the Chateau Marmont.