Ozark’s Julia Garner has been waiting out the coronavirus quarantine like the rest of us—by alternating bouts of anxiety and state-of-the-world-induced depression with therapeutic binge-watching, like Love Is Blind (“It’s next level, it’s so good”) and Tiger King (“I’m obsessed. It’s like Ozark but 100 times weirder.” ) On Friday, as the world lurches into another locked-down weekend, Ozark returns for a third season. And the actor—who won an Emmy last year for playing Jason Bateman’s scrappy, money-laundering sidekick Ruth Langmore—revealed that audiences will see a surprising new side to the character.
Season three picks up with Ruth managing a poker game aboard the Byrde family’s riverboat casino—trying to put the traumatic events of season two, and her late relatives, behind her.
“In the beginning of the season, Ruth really tries to downplay that her father—or that anyone, really—is there for her anymore,” said Garner, explaining that Ruth even makes herself over in an attempt to fit into her life with the Byrdes. “This season, Ruth is trying so hard to be a Byrde. She’s trying to dress up, be more professional—she’s wearing skirts—which is not her at all. She’s putting fake nails on…that’s Ruth trying to be classy…. But it’s not successful, and she’s feeling that she will never be a Byrde, and they will never truly really accept her.”
The strong-willed daughter of a criminal family, Ruth has always projected strength. But her new vulnerability opens her up to an emotion foreign to her.
“Because Ruth feels so alone, she actually ends up falling in love for the first time,” said Garner. “She doesn’t know what normal love is. So you see a much softer, much more playful side of Ruth. That being said, because of the playful side—something happens and she full-on cracks.”
Garner said that it took her about a month, when initially filming Ozark, to figure out who Ruth really was as a fictional character. And in a new project, Shonda Rhimes’s forthcoming Netflix series Inventing Anna, Garner taps into a different kind of cunning criminal—a living one. Garner plays Anna “Delvey” Sorokin, the real-life grifter who posed as an heiress to steal tens of thousands of dollars from friends, banks, restaurants, and hotels. Garner was even able to meet the real-life Sorokin this past January in a New York prison—where Sorokin is serving a sentence of 4 to 12 years—shortly before filming was shut down due to coronavirus concerns.
“It was great to meet her, but definitely weird, because it got really meta. Her accent is really crazy, and she was like, ‘Well, how are you playing me?’ I said I did her accent, and she said, ‘Well, how do you sound?’ So we started talking like each other. Then we were all laughing at the situation,” said Garner, before explaining that she wants to save more of the story for the eventual Inventing Anna press tour, which will be “very interesting.”
“She was really, really sweet…very gentle…and very smart,” said Garner. “That’s the interesting thing—she did all these [terrible things], but people liked her, obviously. And when I met her, I understand why. She has a very funny, very dark sense of humor. She’s an interesting character. You meet her—and whether you love her or hate her, you listen to what she’s going to say, because she’s like a star. It’s weird to say.”
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