Like presumably everyone else, actress Julia Fox is an enigma to me.
Seemingly out of nowhere, she waltzed into pop culture (and thus my life) in 2020 with her break-through role in the Adam Sandler/Safdie Brothers’ movie “Uncut Gems.” And thanks to some bizarre and inscrutable choices and personality quirks, she’s never quite left. The few things I know to be true of her are the following:
1. Her sense of fashion often includes ultra low-rise pants, dark, winged eyeshadow and something made of denim.
2. Her brief relationship with rapper Kanye West aka Ye (pre-his recent antisemitic rants online) was highly publicized thanks to an article called “Date Night” in Interview magazine and a fake headline about Julia going “goblin mode.”
3. On an episode of the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” Julia went viral for both calling herself Ye’s muse and pronouncing the movie “Uncut Gems” like “Uncah Jahmz.”
4. She’s active on TikTok, where she posts unfiltered videos of herself.
And that was it… until today! Thanks to comedy talk show “Ziwe,” I now know something else concrete about Julia: She has Jewish friends.
In an 11-minute video, which teases an upcoming episode themed around men, comedian Ziwe Fumudoh interviews Julia about everything from her relationship with Ye to running for president and working as a dominatrix. About halfway through the video, Ziwe asks a question which she famously asks all her non-Black guests: How many Black friends do you have? To which Julia answered:
“Like a pretty good amount,” adding, “I mean I can’t count them all, like that’s weird. But like, a good amount. I would say that I have a pretty colorful and mixed group of friends. I’m not even actually really friends with any white person who is actually from, like, that area. If they’re white, they’re, like, Jewish.”
She concludes her thought with, “I don’t have any natural blonde friends.”
First: what?!?!? Second: truly incredible stuff.
As Jason P. Frank wrote for Vulture, Fox and Ziwe “go together like peanut butter and jelly, a fox and a hound, or a giant ball of crazy and someone who lives to interview giant balls of crazy. Ziwe is a race-baiting Captain Ahab and Julia Fox is her great white (Italianx) whale.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Julia Fox has the energy of someone who socially intimidates me and personally makes me nervous. That said, I think her comment about having Jewish friends is harmless and recognizes some of the complexity of Jewishness and whiteness, so I’m going to call it a win.
Thanks for being an ally, Julia! And if you want to be friends, hit me up.
