Julia Garner is the kind of actor who commits so intensely to a project, one can be excused for mistaking her for the characters she plays—for example, the con artist Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna, or even the fictional Missouri-based criminal Ruth in Ozark. In her latest project, The Royal Hotel, Garner once again melts into her role—that of Hanna, a young traveler who finds herself in an unnerving situation after she runs out of money in Australia and must take a job at a bar in a remote mining town. Here, Garner talks about the film, the end of Ozark, and the one word she avoids when discussing her performances.
How did The Royal Hotel come into your life?
I worked with [the director] Kitty Green on The Assistant. She called, gave me the script, and that was it. I love working with her, and it was an opportunity to work together again and also to executive produce. It’s been a joy.
Were you a theatrical child?
Yes. I would wake up and start singing, but I was also really shy. That’s one of the reasons I started acting, to overcome my shyness.
The characters you play—from Ruth in Ozark to Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna to Hanna in The Royal Hotel—all seem to have a secret, something internalized that they’d never admit.
I don’t even like saying “characters”—I don’t like that word. They are people. I want to know them so well that I could be having a conversation with you and be worrying about something else as the person I’m playing. And I really do miss them when the project ends.
Do you find it liberating to play these crazy people who aren’t shy?
I do, but I also think that they’re shy in their own way, in the sense where they’re not really exposing who they actually are. Only the audience can see who they actually are.
As Ruth in Ozark, you got to really transform—it’s not fair what happened to her, but they had to end it somehow.
I know. I’m just happy that I made it to the end. Every single season, I would say to the showrunner, Chris Mundy, “Am I going to be okay this year?” He’s like, “You’re fine. You’re not going to die.”
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