Juno Temple Is ‘F–king Really Not Good at Reality.’ But She’s One of the Best at Make-Believe

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T he actress Juno Temple is good at many things, but one of them is not — and has never been — living in the real world. “I’m fucking really not good at reality,” she’d said on a recent Friday afternoon, while taking a turn or two around Tokio7, one of New York City’s most well-loved vintage shopping establishments, and picking up items that seemed to prove her point.

“That’s got some real good twinkle to it, right?” she asks, flittering to a display case that holds a denim belt covered entirely in tiny purple rhinestones. “I’m like a magpie. I love things that sparkle.” Next thing to catch her eye: a pair of perforated leather J’Adore Dior stiletto booties that make the act of walking seem perilous and that happen to not be her size. “Those are quite big,” she says with a frown, slipping the stiletto on anyway. “I could put an insole in them? I like where they come on the ankle.” Then she’s off to try on a black satin trench (“It’s a good one for if we wanted to not wear anything underneath it”) and a silk jacket with extensive ruching (“There’s something about it that almost feels like putting on armor”). The most practical item on her shopping list is a pair of leather pants. “Damn it. These are dream pants,” she says, plucking longingly at the waistband of a pair she knows won’t fit. “I’m always looking for the perfect leather pant. Jeans give me anxiety.”

Jeans, thankfully, are not on her immediate horizon. Last night she arrived in New York for the premiere of Venom: The Last Dance, in which she plays a scientist with a soft spot for symbiotes. Tonight she’ll head to Comic-Con (she’s never been), then she’ll do two days of press junkets before heading to London for the premiere there. Packing for all this glitz and glam, she says, had reduced her to tears: “I’m literally an emotional mess when it comes to packing. I’ve never been good at it. Still to this day, I’m like, ‘How is there not space for these?’” She’d been delighted to arrive in her hotel room and discover “a beautiful little walk-in wardrobe with little lights on. So I had to unpack everything — all my outfits are out on display. It’s like a tiny Carrie Bradshaw closet.”

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Born in London to a producer mom and a director dad — Julien Temple, who’s helmed music videos for the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop — Temple mostly grew up in Somerset, England, where she was “a little bit feral,” as she describes it, and often in a state of make-believe. “I mean, it’s hard to find a childhood photo where I’m not in a costume of some sorts,” she says. She watched The Red Shoes on repeat and decided she wanted to become an actor after she “fell deeply in love with the beast” in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. Before attending the type of boarding school where “it didn’t matter if you weren’t great at math” and where “sometimes it [felt] like rules were meant to be bent a little bit,” she lived near a forest she called the “Wiggly Woggly Wood,” not far from where Byron wrote his poetry and Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned The Ancient Mariner in an opium stupor. “So I had this kind of amazing childhood of dancing with fairies and believing in invisible giants and thinking dinosaurs were going to pop out of the forest,” she says. “I really did believe that.”

Acting seemed like a way to continue to live in that imaginary space. Temple’s first role, fittingly, was as a dinosaur named Amelia Anatosaurus in a school play (“I had to make my own paper mache dinosaur mask”). At 14, having been in two of her dad’s movies (“I was cut out of one of them, so I learned early on you don’t always make the cut”), she told her parents that she wanted to start auditioning professionally, to which their response was, basically, “Fuck.” They needn’t have worried: She booked the first two movies she auditioned for, Notes on a Scandal, the 2006 thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench, and Atonement, Joe Wright’s 2007 adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel. Both films were nominated for numerous Academy Awards. Before taking her A-levels (on which her score in philosophy was “ungradable”), she’d acted alongside some of her idols. By then, she’d also become a bit of a vintage clotheshorse, scouring Portobello Market with her godmother, Scarlett King, a stylist for Eighties bands as well as the film version of Absolutely Fabulous. “The thing with vintage is that things have a story already, and you’re just adding to the story,” Temple says.

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Stories were what she was good at; everyday life proved more challenging. Wandering around the store, she explains how she’s “bad at deadlines” and “bad at keeping time” and “bad at filing papers and shit” and “can’t drive a car — anything with wheels I suck at” and how, soon after she’d moved to L.A., she’d lived in a house her “friends called a dollhouse because it was really tiny and I used to have to keep my shoes in the oven and stuff like that. It was not a functioning kitchen, it was an extension of a closet.” She pauses to look at what appears to be a bedazzled baseball jersey. “I get things wrong a lot when it comes to real life. It’s just — my brain is so bad at those things. I wish I was better at them. It would make things easier, not being flabbergasted by so much.”

In her early twenties, while filming the romantic horror film Jack & Diane in New York, Temple started having panic attacks, her brain rebelling, pulling itself out of whatever reality it found itself in. “First time it ever happened to me, I lost my vision, actually,” Temple says. “I genuinely thought I was never going to see again.” Her co-star Riley Keough knew what was going on and guided Temple through it, but Temple has continued to have panic attacks throughout the years, often for no discernible reason at all.

By the time she’s explaining all this, we’ve made our way to an Alphabet City coffee shop where Temple orders an oat milk latte and a strawberry-and-banana smoothie before alighting at a small table by the counter. Under a dramatically furry jacket, she’s still wearing a sparkly Bach Mai handkerchief top and black Bach Mai pants as well as slightly smoky eye from her Rolling Stone photo shoot earlier that day; paired with her features and wild, blonde curls, the getup makes her look like a fairy creature en route to a nightclub. Still, her affect is not entirely otherworldly: When a young woman approaches Temple to say that she was “amazing in Fargo and Ted Lasso,” the actor chit-chats cheerily and thanks her profusely.

“I have all the time in the world to meet people that have been inspired by Keeley or care about her because she meant a fuck-lot to me,” Temple says of her Ted Lasso character as the fan walks off. If acting started as an exercise in fantasy-building, she goes on to explain, she’s come to realize that it’s become her way of facing reality, of funneling experience through made-up stories, and drawing something real from them nonetheless. For one, “it gets rid of the noise going on in your head about things, whether they’re food-oriented, whether they’re money-oriented, whether they’re being present, whatever,” Temple explains. But also, it helps you actually “experience a lot of the things that this character may be going through.”

For Keeley Jones, an influencer who goes from topless modeling to running her own PR firm, that was discovering the power of her own intellect, something Temple says she related to profoundly (“It was like, ‘Huh, my brain is interesting and maybe it is a powerful thing, even if it is eclectic and hard to keep up with sometimes’”). For a character like Fargo’s Dot Lyon, it was the power of a quiet, unassuming sort of strength. “Imagine you get the opportunity to inhabit an extraordinary creature like Dot, who has been through it a lot, survived a lot, and is no victim,” Temple marvels. What made it even more real was the response she received from Fargo viewers, people opening up to her and sharing their experiences of abuse, the character having become an emotional conduit for their lived reality. “When people feel safe enough to be able to share things with you? That’s something that I feel very protective of,” Temple tells me.