Julia Garner Disappears Again, This Time as Caroline Ellison

Julia Garner plays Caroline Ellison, the imprisoned chief executive of Alameda Research, in "The Altruists," a Netflix limited series premiering Nov. 19. Created by Graham Moore, the series charts the rise and fall of FTX and Alameda Research, the cryptocurrency firms founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, now jailed for fraud and conspiracy.

Garner, 32, has built a career on such disappearances. Anthony Boyle, who plays Bankman-Fried, mistook her for a background actor the first time he saw her in full makeup. "It was like a magic trick," he said. "She was a different person."

What does the transformation involve?

The physical work was extensive: colored contacts, facial prosthetics and a wig system, adding up to more than two hours a day in the makeup trailer. Ellison declined a meet, unlike Anna Sorokin, whom Garner played in "Inventing Anna." So Garner worked from the few videos available, building a gawky walk, a gasping laugh, a lower voice frayed at the ends and accelerated speech.

The distance between actor and character was considerable. Ellison was a math prodigy; Garner failed math. Ellison is emotionally illiterate; Garner calls herself an emotional whiz. "I just wanted to see how far I could go," Garner said.

Moore framed it as courage. "Julia is such a high diver," he said. "She will choose to jump from the highest platform into the deepest water." Zach Cregger, who directed her in the 2025 horror hit "Weapons," said: "She just throws herself into all these different roles and is unrecognizable."

How does Garner approach acting?

She rejects the word once cameras roll. "I'm just being at that moment," she said. "I'm just living it." She knows how that sounds — "super artsy," "actory" — and doesn't care. "I always want to act and feel like no one is watching me," she said.

Her method is unusual. She invites a character in. "I literally can physically feel when I'm leaving and having another person coming," she said. "It sounds so crazy."

She credits part of her onscreen unpredictability to childhood epilepsy, never knowing when the next seizure would come. "There is something about that that forces you to be present," she said. Her script choices follow the same logic. "If I read something and I'm not scared to do it, I just don't do it," she said.

Where did she come from?

Garner grew up in Riverdale, in the Bronx, about 10 miles north of Zitomer's, the Upper East Side pharmacy where she has shopped since high school and where this interview partly took place. Her mother, a psychotherapist, had once been a comedic actress; her father, a painter, also taught art. She struggled with learning differences and remembers pretending to understand things when she couldn't — acting, in effect, from an early age.

Early tween parts on Nickelodeon didn't come. Indies suited her better: a significant role in the 2011 cult drama "Martha Marcy May Marlene," a starring turn in 2012's "Electrick Children." Studio executives suggested dyeing her hair and getting veneers. "I was like, they have no taste," she recalled. Then came "The Americans," as an F.B.I. agent's daughter, and the baby-faced, dirty-mouthed criminal matriarch Ruth on "Ozark."

What's next?

Recovery between roles takes weeks of what she calls bed rotting, rest and art. "I have to make sure to feed my soul, as corny as that sounds," she said. "Because I don't play actresses, I play people."

She has finished "Tyrant," a fine-dining suspense film with Charlize Theron, will play half of an adulterous couple in the thriller "Guilty Creatures," and shot an episode of Apple TV's "The Studio" as "a crazy version of myself," opposite Madonna — a nod to the Madonna biopic still mired in development. She has threatened to quit for years. "I love acting so much," she said. "I sometimes hate it, but I love it. I love it even on the worst day. I don't really know anything else."