Julia Fox in conversation with Joey Soloway at Live Talks Los Angeles discussing her memoir,
"Down the Drain." The talk took place on Oct 23, 2023.
Julia Fox is a multidisciplinary artist. She’s had a fashion label, published art books, and held numerous exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She inspired the character in her break out role in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems and has acted in numerous films since. She’s a strong advocate for sustainability and a do-it-yourself attitude. She cohosts a podcast called Forbidden Fruits. She is a single mom and currently lives in New York City with her son Valentino.
Joey Soloway is an award-winning writer, director, producer, and LGBT activist. Soloway is the creator of the groundbreaking Amazon original series Transparent. Over the course of its five-season run, Transparent” received 24 Emmy nominations and eight Emmy awards - including two for Solowayʼs directing - as well as two Golden Globes. Soloway launched their arts career in Chicago’s Off-Loop theatre movement in the 1990s, creating the underground hit The Real Live Brady Bunch. Other TV and film credits include: Six Feet Under, I Love Dick, Grey’s Anatomy, United States of Tara and Afternoon Delight, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Soloway is co-writer and producer of stage play A Transparent Musical. They are adapting the book The Ethical Slut, developing a comedic travel series called The Godyssey and The South Commons Experiment a personal documentary investigating what it meant to grow up in a “racial utopia”. Soloway launched The Disruptors Fellowship, a program supporting emerging television writers of color who identify as transgender, non-binary, disabled, and/or undocumented/ formerly undocumented.
Julia Fox is famous for many things: her captivating acting, such as her breakout role in the film Uncut Gems; her trendsetting style, including bleached eyebrows, exaggerated eyeshadow, and cutout dresses; her mastery of social media, where she entertains and educates her millions of followers. But all these share the trait for which she is most famous: unabashedly and unapologetically being herself.
This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain. Fox recounts her turbulent path: her parents’ volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist”; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience-it’s all in her memoir, in raw, remarkable and riveting detail.