Just when I’d been convinced that pigeons were the season’s must-have accessory, Julia Fox goes to Sundance and starts talking about a ghost like it’s a designer mini-Bernedoodle she flew in from a breeder in Ohio.
Let’s rewind, shall we? This weekend, the Down the Drain memoirist and G-string enthusiast was busy making the rounds at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. In town to promote Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming film Presence, she’d already caused a snow flurry by wearing a white crochet string bikini over a catsuit in the dead of winter in a mountain town. But when she sat down with her co-stars to chat with Vulture — this time in a Canadian tuxedo, a veil, and a belt that read “Mother” — Fox was ready to address something a little scarier than a woman wearing a bathing suit in the snow.
@sundanceorg Of course Julia Fox has a ghost in her home 👻 #sundance #filmtok #juliafox
♬ original sound - Sundance Institute
When host Jay Jurden asked Fox if she’d ever had an experience with an “otherworldly presence,” she answered, unaffected: “Of course. Every day.” Fox told Jurden she was recently “drawn” to buy a home (this $2.9 million Harlem townhouse, perhaps?), and later discovered a shrine that had been erected in honor of the friendly ghost that lives there.
“She’s the matriarch of the home, and she watches over us,” Fox added. “Her name’s Beauty.”
I’m obligated to note that a version of this shrine-ghost story Fox mentioned reportedly takes place in Presence. But that has no bearing on whether or not I’m going to delight in Julia Fox’s weird press cycle monologues — fictional or otherwise. And a hearty congratulations to Beauty, who seems to have found her forever home with Julia Fox and her son in Harlem. If there are any other matriarch ghosts in the city, I, too, am in the market for a nurturing ghost roommate.