Fairuza Balk was a hot commodity in the 1990s, lending her signature goth-punk flavor to popular films of every genre. And then, just like that, she disappeared from the spotlight.
It was a curious move for a child star who had successfully transitioned into adult acting roles. But The Craft star had legitimate reasons for stepping away from the limelight. And although she’s mostly walked away from red carpets and magazine interviews, she remains committed to various creative pursuits.
Find out what’s up with Fairuza Balk now that she’s living a more low-key existence.
She Grew Tired Of The ‘Strange Bubble’ Of Hollywood
Balk didn’t fade out for lack of talent. In 2013, she told Dread Central that she wanted to be selective about her roles.
“I always want to stay interested; I never just want to work for the sake of working,” she said. “There has to be ‘something’ there for me so that I can grow from the experience. I’ve never just taken a job because I wanted the check—I took the job because either I wanted to do something really crazy … There has to be something interesting for me or I don’t want to do it.”
She also slowed down for the sake of her sanity. In 2020, she told the Los Angeles Times that she had grown tired of the way she was packaged for an audience.
“[In] my late 20s I stepped away from doing a lot of press because people just kept taking my words and rearranging them the wrong way and just depicting me as this crazy bad girl and it just really got old,” she said. “They weren’t really listening to what I was actually saying, they just collected sound bites from other interviews that had misquoted me. So I just felt like ‘OK, I can’t win.'”
The actress continued to talk about the pressures of Hollywood, and how she didn’t quite fit the mold.
“Also, Hollywood is a very strange bubble, a very strange world, and some of the things—as the general public is starting to find out—some of the elements of that game are things I just couldn’t do. I’m just not wired that way or brought up that way. I had to step back for my own well-being and sense of self-preservation.”
Is She Still Acting?
Balk still loves acting and has appeared in a couple of more recent projects.
In 2021 she starred in the Prime Video series Paradise City; her last TV gig before that was in 2015 on Showtime’s Ray Donavan. She also had a cameo in 2020’s The Craft: Legacy—the sequel to the film that kickstarted her mainstream career.
Despite appearing in the sequel to The Craft, Balk told the LA Times that she hasn’t seen it and doesn’t plan on seeing it. She claimed that she stopped watching her work years ago. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t still excited about acting.
“Well acting, hopefully, I’ll be able to do for the rest of my life,” she told the LA Times. “That was the goal.”
But Balk added a caveat, saying. “I love to do the actual work but the rest of it is not suited to everybody, let’s put it that way.”
What Is Fairuza Balk Doing Today?
When Balk’s not acting, she is busy working in every other creative medium. She creates fine art, works in ink, and art prints that are available on her own website.
“I started looking into and spending more time on other art forms that I really enjoy and I’m far happier for it,” Balk told the LA Times. She added that she’s currently into metalsmithing, a skill she’s learning from her multi-talented father.
She also releases music under the name Armed Love Militia. In May 2021, she announced that she made all previous ALM tracks available via streaming services. Balk plans to record more songs—and she hopes to tap her dad as a collaborator on some of that new work.
“I’ve always looked at my career from the perspective of: when I look back on this, what will I think? Will this project be something that I’m glad that I did? Is it going to say anything?” she explained in the Los Angeles Times interview. “You have to be OK with yourself and the work that you do enough to just release what you’ve done into the world and let that be OK.”