All About Julia Garner’s Husband, Mark Foster

Emmy award-winning actress Julia Garner is a rising star best known for her role on Ozark as Ruth Langmore. In 2023, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her leading role in Inventing Anna. Her husband, Mark Foster, has also had huge success in his field as a musician, leading the Grammy-nominated band Foster the People.

The couple share a mutually supportive relationship, backing each other in all their artistic endeavors. Here’s everything to know about Mark Foster and his marriage to Julia Garner.

Foster is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, according to NPR. He attended Nordonia High School, then moved to Los Angeles. From early on, Foster was involved in the music business at various levels and started at music production company Mophonics, where he wrote commercial jingles. He was also working on his personal music and band, Foster the People. He has attributed his success to some of that early commercial work, telling Bloomberg in 2012, “Foster the People wouldn’t exist without Mophonics. Mophonics is kind of a creative home for me.”

He even told American Songwriter in a 2011 interview that he worked on his album Torches at the studio, writing his big 2010 hit “Pumped Up Kicks” in a “little writer’s room at Mophonics.”

Foster also told Interview magazine, “When I wasn’t composing for commercials, I would write. Four months later, I started the band, and eight months later, we were signed. I went from one of the lowest places that I have been in my life and within a year was in the best place I’ve ever been.”

Foster the People has been nominated for Grammys twice, once in 2012 for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and Best Alternative Music Album and then in 2013 for Best Short Form Music Video for “Houdini.”

Foster has worked a number of different jobs in music production and even collaborated with Taylor Swift on “Forever Winter” in 2012, which was rerecorded in 2021 for her album Red (Taylor’s Version).

“It’s a really cool song, you know?” he told Fuse when it was first released. “We kind of just went into it casually, like ‘Yeah, let’s just jam and just like have fun,’ and something really cool came out of it.”

On Oct. 8, 2024, he shared a carousel of pictures from the Austin City Limits Music Festival, which included a photo of Garner hanging out backstage.

“snapshot of weekend one at @aclfestival // thank you to everyone who came out and welcomed us back after seven years,” he wrote in the caption.

The pair knew one another for many years before they started dating. According to The Hollywood Reporter, they met at Sundance in 2013 outside of the Eccles Theater. She told Vogue in 2020 that they realized they had a connection in their first conversation.

“We realized that my grandmother lived in the same small town that his dad lives in, just outside of Cleveland,” she shared. Garner lived in New York but would visit, and they would see “each other in Cleveland at Christmas time, year after year.”

Garner added, “It kind of became a tradition.”

Foster then started following her on Instagram. She told THR in 2020, “I was like, ‘Who’s this guy liking all my photos? Is this a stalker?’ I clicked on him, and I was like, ‘Oh, Mark. Oh, he’s cute. I’m going to follow him back.’ Then he DM’d me.”

A few years after meeting, they began dating and got engaged in 2019. Garner said they were on a trip to Montana when Foster popped the question.

“He read me a poem he had written to me, and when he finished, he dropped to a knee and asked me to marry him,” she said.

They got married a year later. Garner told Vogue, “We went back and forth from having a big wedding to eloping in Vegas. We ultimately decided to get married at City Hall in New York City, just like my parents did 40 years ago.”

Foster wrote her a song for their first dance called “Lovers in a Stream.”

“It was a surprise,” Garner explained. “Mark wrote, produced, and sang it. It was very surreal, and the most beautiful present I’ve ever received. It felt like I was floating up in the air—it was the most magical moment I’ve ever had.”

Garner won her first Emmy in 2019 for Ozark. In her acceptance speech, she called Foster “the love of my life.”

For her second Emmy, she thanked her husband and family again, and then again in 2022. In January 2023, Garner took home a Golden Globe, and said in her acceptance speech, “My husband, Mark, I love you.”

In December 2024, the couple starred in a Gucci campaign, featuring a picture of them sharing a magical winter’s kiss. The caption from the fashion brand read, “It’s a story of family, of kissing, lots of kisses. Gucci Gift campaign starring Julia Garner + Mark Foster.”

In January 2025, Garner shared a carousel of pictures from their trip to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, starting with an adorable photo of herself and Foster in their ski gear.