The Transformation Of Julia Garner From Childhood To 28 Years Old

Though she would later rocket to fame for playing a Middle-American character in "Ozark," Julia Garner was raised in a very different environment. She grew up in New York City; according to The Hollywood Reporter, she lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx. Her father was an artist from Ohio; her mother was an Israeli comedian who starred on a show similar to "Saturday Night Live." Their house, she told The Gentlewoman, was full of "books and rugs and the philosophy and the paintings... just cactuses and books and, like, old electronics and a Matisse poster."

It sounds like her upbringing was hectic, but in a positive way. "I feel so lucky that I grew up in the house that I did," she said in THR. "It's crazy — don't get me wrong — but it's good crazy." She described hours-long family arguments that wound up feeling extremely productive, as everyone in the family got to have their issues aired out in the open.

She also struggled in school as a child, and her doctors were concerned that she might have a learning disability when it took her until age 10 to learn how to read. "If you can't read, there's not a lot you can do," she said to The Gentlewoman. "Reading is everything." However, there was another side effect. "I almost had to learn how to act even from that age," she later reflected to Rolling Stone, "act like I knew and I could understand what everybody was talking about."

Julia Garner cultivated an appreciation for old cinema at an early age. "When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Turner Classic Movies," she later told Vanity Fair. "I remember loving 'All About' Eve because it was the first time I saw Bette Davis. And later I became really passionate about films from the 70s." She channeled her love of old films into early experiments with acting, later sharing on Instagram that she performed in a grade school production of "The Wizard of Oz" as Glinda the Good Witch.

She revealed in an interview on BUILD Series that acting when she was younger helped her find confidence. "I started in this business because I was very shy," she said. "I started taking acting classes to overcome my shyness." In The New York Times, she elaborated. "I was 15 and I wanted to keep myself busy. I really liked how it felt," she said.

While still a minor, Garner went out for parts in student films at Columbia's film school, according to The Gentlewoman. Her hobby of auditioning got her in the door at a casting call for the American version of UK hit teen show "Skins," and she nearly got the part. "It finally came down to me and another girl out of the 1,500 kids. That was my first professional audition," she recalled. It didn't work out, but Garner had been bitten by the acting bug.

In 2014, Julia Garner appeared in Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For," playing Marcie. Her casting shows just how much her star had risen in the few short years since her debut; her name is on the cast list alongside mega-stars like Josh Brolin, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, and Lady Gaga. She played the girlfriend of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Johnny, and as such, her character was one of the most important things in his life. The stylization of the film meant that, while most of the world appears to be black and white, Garner herself was shot in desaturated color, her bold lipstick and her blonde curls popping off the screen. She particularly liked acting alongside Gordon-Levitt, telling Collider, "He's honestly such a wonderful guy and he's great to work with so I was very lucky that I got to work with him."

The other major difference with Garner's performance in the film is that it required to act against a green screen, which was the first time she had done so. "For the first day, it was just very strange," she told Filler. However, like the professional she is, Garner found a way to get herself into the right headspace. "I thought, what's the difference between this and going into an audition and imagining everything there when there is only the chair, the reader and the camera?" she recalled.

One of Julia Garner's biggest transformations was for the little-seen film "Tomato Red: Blood Money," a role that feels in retrospect like a precursor to her Ozark character. In the 2017 flick, she plays Jamalee Merridew, a young woman living in poverty who gets caught up in a dangerous situation. "It's from the guy who wrote 'Winter's Bone,' Daniel Woodrell," Garner explained to IndieWire. "It is about a family in the Ozarks. It's kind of the same tone and feel of 'Winter's Bone.'"

For her role, Garner dyed her trademark curly blonde hair a shocking shade of red. While her hair didn't stay that hue for good, it sure sounds like she connected with the cast and crew. Ahead of its release, she Instagrammed clips of the team at the Dublin Film Festival and wrote, "So much love for these people!!!"

The role helped her develop an Ozarks accent, which would come in handy on her next audition. She told Vulture that when she went out for her part in Netflix's "Ozark," she realized that her character Ruth would speak just like she had in "Tomato Red: Blood Money." However, when she got to her audition, she noticed no one else was using the accent she had perfected on her last film. "I had memorized my lines with an accent, and I just couldn't do it without it," she reflected to Vulture. "I thought that I wouldn't get the job because of it." Luckily, the opposite was true; without "Tomato Red," we might never have seen Garner as Ruth.

Julia Garner appeared without her trademark curls to play Terra Newell in the first season of "Dirty John," wearing her hair in long waves in Bravo's thriller based on the hit podcast about a con man who wormed his way into an unsuspecting family. Newell is the daughter of the woman who finds herself in a relationship with a man who claims to be a doctor; she is suspicious of the man's credentials and wary of the way he seems to be controlling her mother, even as her mom falls more and more in love. As Decider noted, this required yet another distinctive voice for the star; she perfectly mimicked the idiosyncratic lilt of Newell herself, who narrated part of the podcast. Garner devoured the podcast when she learned the role was available, telling Vanity Fair, "I heard they were making it into a series, so I listened to the whole thing in one day and did not stop—I'd never heard anything like it before!"

On the "Watch What Happens Live" after show, Garner confessed that she was spooked while listening to the podcast and watching the series. "It's really scary... It could happen to anybody," she said.

Her role in "Ozark" is perhaps Julia Garner's most recognizable work, and it's certainly been her most critically acclaimed. Her colleagues, too, have heaped her with praise. Co-star and executive producer Jason Bateman told The Gentlewoman that he was blown away by her audition. "As soon as Julia started, we were like, Oh, this is going to be a much bigger character than even in the [show] bible," he recalled. Co-star Laura Linney added, "The minute she cocked her head and a piece of hair sort of juggled in the wind and that voice came out, you were like, Oh, wow. Well, hello."

Garner has racked up two Emmys for the role, winning in both 2019 and 2020. She delivered a delightful speech her first time at the podium, exclaiming to the crowd, "This looks kind of like a piece of chocolate, wrapped in a candy wrapper!" This was intended to be a metaphor about sharing a piece with each person who helped her get there, she laughed, but she admitted to being so nervous that it didn't come out quite right.

It seems that her awards run shows no sign of slowing down; the star was nominated for two Emmys in 2022, for both "Ozark" and "Inventing Anna." She signed a deal with a production studio called Tomorrow Studios; exec Becky Clements told Variety, "She is so bright, so prolific... oh my goodness, that woman is going to be an Oscar winner."

In 2022, Julia Garner showed off another side of her acting chops on Netflix's "Inventing Anna." The actor underwent quite the transformation to play scammer Anna Delvey, aka Anna Sorokin, a woman who managed to convince a ridiculous number of people that she was a socialite and that they should send her money. The role required Garner to ditch her trademark blonde curls in favor of a series of wigs. She also showed off her ease with accent work, perfectly imitating the German-born woman's idiosyncratic purr. When the series was released, she posted a timelapse video to her Instagram showing off her physical transformation, giving a shoutout to the glam squad that made it happen each day on set.

When the Shonda Rhimes-produced series dropped on Netflix, all anyone could talk about was that accent. Garner broke down her process for Elle, explaining, "It's German, but then she grew up in Russia, so you hear a little bit of the Russian inflection alongside the German. But then the musicality of it is more American." However, she noted, the accent also revealed something about the character. "She's struggling a lot with her own identity, so you see her pick up on traits from whoever she's hanging out with."

Whatever she was doing, it worked; Garner was nominated for a 2022 Emmy for "Outstanding Lead Actress In A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie."