NEW YORK — Julia Garner, the three-time Emmy winner from “Ozark,” is taking on Caroline Ellison, the former girlfriend and business partner of Sam Bankman-Fried, in the new Netflix series “The Altruists,” and she told CBS News that clown school helped her get there.
Ellison was Bankman-Fried’s accomplice in the multibillion-dollar fraud that led to the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Garner said she builds characters by studying photos obsessively. “I’ll cover half of their face and I’ll just focus on their eyes,” she said.
Garner grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and described herself as “deathly shy.” She took her first acting class at 14 and landed her first film role at 16 in 2011’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”
Her breakout came as Ruth Langmore in “Ozark,” which earned her a Golden Globe and three Emmys. She later received another Golden Globe nomination for “Inventing Anna.”
Garner, 32, said the attention began to unnerve her, and during the 2023 actors’ strike she enrolled in a clown school in France. “He’s like, ‘You are hiding from something, you feel a lot of shame,'” she recalled of her instructor. Asked what she learned, she said, “Not being afraid to fail.”
Madonna had picked Garner to play her in a biopic that has since been shelved. “I would love for the movie to get made, obviously, but I also feel whatever happens, I made a great friend,” Garner said.
“The Altruists” is streaming on Netflix.
Sources: CBS News. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: Wesley Tingey wesleytingey / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.
