Julia Fox: Has any modern star had as shocking a life as the Uncut Gems actress?

Fox's memoir is a whirl of alleged abuse, drug deaths, sugar daddies – and Kanye West. Photo / Getty Images

Usually, actors trace their careers to playing with their first camera, starring in a school play, or spending years at drama school. Julia Fox had no prior acting experience when she starred opposite Adam Sandler in the Safdie brothers’ 2019 film Uncut Gems, then became one of 2022′s most photographed women as “muse” to her boyfriend Kanye West. Instead, her first character work had taken place in a place she calls “the dungeon” in New York. It was, in fact, her first paid job, as a dominatrix. She was 18.

As Fox, now 33, writes in her memoir, Down the Drain: “I revel in the fact I can be anyone at any given moment. I transform into your mean mommy, an evil nun, the b---hy popular girl in high school, all in a day’s work. My strong intuition and excellent improvisation skills keep the job interesting and the money rolling in.”

Julia Fox is seen front row during LuisaViaRoma & British Vogue – Runway Icons at Piazzale Michelangelo on June 14, 2023 in Florence, Italy. Photo / Getty Images

Down the Drain is full of such revelations. She becomes aware of her physicality aged 11, after spending an evening smoking marijuana and drinking Jack Daniel’s – one of the many eye-popping details that Fox normalises through their sheer frequency. That night, a 26-year-old “friend”, who says she looks 17, starts kissing her. This may seem disturbing, but Fox doesn’t apply the judgement of hindsight, and keeps the reader uncomfortably embedded in her child’s psyche. She calls the encounter “exhilarating”, and writes: “I start shedding the baggy clothes and embrace my figure. I’m hooked to the power.”

This is somehow one of Fox’s less dramatic allegations. Other pages are littered with graphic accounts of domestic and sexual abuse, beginning when Fox is a young child. As she grows up, her accounts of heroin overdoses and rape are told with wincing clarity. So much happens to her that, at times, her memoir reads like a thriller: gangsters, kidnapping, prison, guns, sex and violence, told engagingly with reams of dialogue and a meticulous eye for detail.

By the age of 16, Fox is so immersed within New York’s underbelly that she spends one night printing money, instinctively knowing to rub butter over the notes and iron them for a more realistic texture; later, a friend reveals his relief that she isn’t going to rob him. When she’s booked for Uncut Gems by her friend Josh Safdie, whom she met at a cafe in Manhattan in her mid-20s and who apparently wrote the role just for her, Fox is out of her mind on drugs every day of filming. Several of her friends, also addicts, die.

And yet, despite this trauma rollercoaster, her writing often breaks into unexpected humour. When a teacher corrects her at school, she describes hearing “gasps around the room harmonising like a s****y choir”. During a scene in which a friend says goodbye to her at the airport, Fox writes: “We hug and ugly-cry like two long-lost lesbians.” During a fight with her billionaire sugar-daddy, Rohan, who insists on calling her, in French, his “doll”, she huffs: “I just want to be a regular girl sometimes! Being your poopy…” He corrects her: “It’s poupée.”

Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. Photo / Supplied

By the time you get to the reason that many people will be reading this book, Fox’s romance with one of the world’s most controversial superstars feels almost irrelevant. Certainly, Kanye West seems the least interesting thing to have happened to her – which might be why it’s confined to the last chapter.

Described here only as “the artist”, West invites Fox – who, now sober, had just given birth to her son Valentino, an odd choice given her dominatrix name was Valentina – to meet him at a club on New Year’s Eve in 2021. Fox writes that she felt something “special” between them, and yet, as with almost every romantic relationship she describes in the book, she soon feels trapped. West, in Fox’s telling, makes her his muse, turning her into a fashion accessory to be dangled in front of the paparazzi.

Fox claims that West insists on approving what she wears every time they meet; his assistant even hauls her into a restaurant toilet to change after Fox arrives for dinner with West in an outfit he doesn’t like. His team comes to her flat to pack away all her clothes in cardboard boxes, replacing her entire wardrobe. He offers to pay for a breast-lift. He demands that she sign an NDA. She accuses him of leaking intimate photos of them to the press, asking her to write an account of how they met for Interview magazine, then re-writing a fabricated version.

“I feel like he’s using me in some weird, twisted game. It makes me feel dirty,” writes Fox, before revealing how her extreme weight loss was prompted by the stress of maintaining her relationship with West and caring for her 1-year-old son. Eventually, she dumps West, and many of the acting roles and fashion deals he had helped her secure fall through. “As I shed weight and lose my famous curves, something unexpected happens. Men no longer find me attractive, and strangely, it’s liberating.”

Kanye West and Julia Fox together on January 23, 2022. Photo / Getty Images

Shrewdly capitalising on her “moment”, Fox continued to spend months revelling in outrageous clothes – going to the supermarket in her underwear, holding a preposterous handbag made from a pair of jeans, or attending a red carpet in head-to-toe latex. She seemed to be playing the internet like a fiddle, knowing exactly what the paparazzi wanted, and what would go viral. Every one of her actions was like a wink at the absurdity of fame itself. This shamelessness, combined with her comic and candid videos, including a tour of her chaotically messy New York apartment, earned her an adoring following.

When, earlier this year, Fox announced this book, describing it as “not a memoir, but a masterpiece”, many – myself included – assumed it would never really materialise, or that it would be something more akin to performance art than prose. Yet here it is.

Down the Drain isn’t exactly a literary masterpiece – the prose is high-drama, and often sags into cliche – but it is, at least, a gripping and powerful coming-of-age story that exposes the terrible repercussions of childhood neglect, society’s routine exploitation of the female body and the hollowness of celebrity.

It’s also a reminder that those who are underestimated often have the last laugh. As Fox writes, in a brilliant final line: “I was ridiculed for being different and for doing whatever I had to do to survive. But now everyone is wearing latex.”