Sofia Coppola may be a household name among film buffs, but her 12-year marriage to Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars is often overlooked.
The couple has been married since 2011 and shares two daughters, Romy and Cosima. Although Coppola and Mars are rarely featured together, they support each other’s work. When Coppola wasn’t given the rights to Elvis Presley’s music to use in his 2023 movie Priscilla, Mars and the French pop rock band came on board to write the music.
“This allowed us to be more creative,” he said Hollywood Reporter He added that in 2023, the band covered Frankie Avalon’s song “Venus”.
In an interview with the Madrid daily newspaper El PaísMars, whose band consists of childhood friends, admitted that he did not follow old advice to keep his work and personal life separate.
“I know they said it shouldn’t have happened, but I don’t know, it just happened naturally,” he said. “I do this with my friends, so it’s not a job.”
So who is Sofia Coppola’s husband? Here’s everything you need to know about Thomas Mars and his relationship with the producer.
grew up in Versailles
Mars was born and raised outside Paris around the Palace of Versailles, a former home of the French royal family that dates back to the 17th century and is known for its rich history, extensive gardens and extensive art collection.
In a 2010 interview with Vulture, Mars described how the region describes the desire to create something new.
“I lived in a museum,” he said. “Our disappointment was that everything good had happened in the past and they didn’t allow anything new to happen.”
Mars said NPR In 2022, as a teenager, he “refused” to enter the palace, preferring instead to sneak into the gardens at night.
Lead singer of French indie rock band Phoenix.
According to a 2018 interview with Indiespect, Mars has been the lead singer of Phoenix since their formation in 1996. However, he began recording music much earlier with bandmates Christian Mazzalai, Laurent Brancowitz and Deck D’Arcy.
“We were actually 10 years old when we started making things,” he told The Creative Independent in 2017., He added that he tried to look for other career paths but left the university after four days. “The only thing I know how to do besides bartending is music.”
The group has released seven studio albums and won a Grammy for their fourth album. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
He met while working with Coppola Virgin Suicides
Coppola and Mars first met on the set of their 1999 film Virgin Suicides, He was asked to play drums and sing on the track “Playground Love”. She was married to director Spike Jonze at the time, but they divorced in 2003.
Apperantly, Virgin Suicides It will be just the first of many projects on which Coppola and Mars will collaborate. Phoenix contributed songs Lost in Translation, Somewhere, Bling Ring And He was deceived. The band also made a cameo appearance in the 2006 film. Marie Antoinette as a quartet playing the oud.
“It’s hard to separate work from personal life, but I always felt a really strong connection watching his movies,” Mars said in a 2017 interview. Shocked. “There are things in his films that only make sense when you watch them.”
They got married in Italy
Coppola and Mars married on August 27, 2011, after announcing their engagement in May of the same year. The small ceremony for 80 people was held at a villa in southern Italy where the grandparents grew up, and the couple’s daughters also attended.
The mayor of the town led the garden ceremony and told the people: that the incident was “simple”. Her father, director Francis Ford Coppola, walked her down the aisle while wearing a custom lavender gown.
According to this rolling stoneAmong the guests were Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp and director George Lucas.
In March 2023, Romy went viral on TikTok for sharing that she was grounded after trying to rent a helicopter from New York to Maryland with Mars’ credit card to have dinner with her campmate.
The video was later deleted, but the teenager explained that her parents’ “biggest rule” was that she wasn’t allowed to have any public social media accounts.
While Mars did not comment on the incident, Coppola said her daughter had received compliments on her filmmaking.
“He’s funny,” he said. THR. ““But having people publicly discuss my parenting wasn’t what I expected.”
His band’s latest album was inspired by a near-death experience
In November 2022, Phoenix released their seventh studio album. Alpha ZuluWhat they recorded at the Louvre “in the middle of the epidemic”” Mars later explained that the inspiration for the name came from a near-death experience he had while sitting in the co-pilot’s seat on a plane taking off from Belize.
“The plane was turbulent and the pilot was talking to the control tower and saying, ‘What’s going on? What altitude can I go to? Because this is bad.’ El País.
Mars said the control tower responded to the pilot with the ship’s indicator: Alpha Zulu.
“I was watching everyone screaming and reacting. I had never witnessed how someone reacted to the possibility of death. I thought I had forgotten, but one day in the studio I improvised and started singing: ‘Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu. ‘”
His uncle was a well-known literary critic
Coppola isn’t the only person with famous family ties. Mars is the nephew of German journalist, novelist and literary critic Hellmuth Karasek, who died in 2015.
The singer said he was “a really fun encyclopedia” and was a big supporter of Phoenix.
“At one of the first shows we played at Versailles, a lot of people didn’t really care for the band,” Mars told Indiespect. “And I remember he was the first person to start clapping at the end of the show. He knew the potential.”
They live in New York but Mars works in Paris
According to this New York Post, Coppola and Mars lived in Paris for several years before moving to New York in 2010 after their two daughters were born. Still, the singer told Indiespect that he travels to Paris once a month to work with his other bandmates.
He later shared this NPR He said that Phoenix’s 2022 song “My Elixir” describes the feeling of being away from his family.
“The song is mostly about exile because…whether we’re on tour, away from our families, away from home…but you can enjoy those moments as long as you know there’s a home that’s still there for you.