The internet has discovered a new nepo baby.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola and Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars’ 16-year-old daughter Romy Croquet Mars has gone viral on TikTok for sharing a truly chaotic story.
Like your typical teenager, she was in trouble with her parents — and found herself grounded. But, it wasn’t for a normal faux pas like failing a school test or staying out past curfew. No, it was because she attempted to charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland to have dinner with a friend from summer camp — all with her father’s credit card.
As payback for her punishment, she decided to post a video to the social media platform showing how she makes vodka sauce pasta.
"I thought I would do this since I’m already grounded because my parents’ biggest rule is that I’m not allowed to have any public social media accounts", she said in the 49-second clip. “Because they don’t want me to be a nepotism kid, but TikTok is not gonna make me famous so it doesn’t really matter."
this tiktok of sofia coppola’s daughter… this means so much to me pic.twitter.com/6AQtWNhAgG
— savannah ~* (@savbrads) March 21, 2023
She’s not just a nepo baby, but a nepo-grandbaby — with legendary Hollywood director Francis Coppola of The Godfather fame as her grandfather. While her mother has an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for her film, Lost in Translation, and has directed movies such asThe Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring. Coppola, though, is determined to keep her children out of the family business, for now.
In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, the journalist said “Coppola’s guard goes up slightly when the subject turns to her family: she keeps a determinedly low public profile, insistent that her daughters’ lives go largely uninterrupted by her career and her travels.”
“I don’t want them ever to be jaded,” she said at the time. “I never saw the point of taking little kids to movie premieres and stuff. I just want them to have a childhood.”
Nonetheless, Romy has become a hit on social media with one Twitter user quick to point out that, “She’s a damn storyteller — just like her mother,” and praised her for being what we want from children of celebrities, which is extremely entertaining.
In one part of the viral clip, she said she did not know the difference between onions and garlic.
"I just had to Google images of onions on my phone," she said. "I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed," she added, before returning to her onion and asking viewers, "Is this an onion? ‘Cause I feel like this doesn’t look like an onion. This looks like the inner workings of a ball sack."
She then panned the camera to her babysitter’s boyfriend, who was petting a dog in the five-storey West Village townhouse that her parents bought in 2012 for $9.85 million (£8m). When she’s not filming cooking tutorials in the New York base, she’s likely to be visiting any one of the family’s extensive property portfolio, which includes a villa in Bernalda, Italy (where Coppola and Mars were married in 2011) and a vineyard in California.
“My parents are never home so these are my replacement parents,” joked Romy, referencing her babysitter and the boyfriend.
Ironically, only days before Romy’s social media debut, her mother told the ââthe Guardian about when the last time she cried was: “Two weeks before shooting — after some of our financing dropped out — when the producers said I had to cut a week’s worth of scenes out of my script. I was on location and away from my daughters [currently in middle and high school] who I felt were needing a mother,” in reference to Romy and her little sister Cosima, 12.
Sadly, Romy never got round to making the promised vodka sauce pasta, but promised fans for a TikTok part two.
We might have to wait a while though, as her account, which had 26,000 followers, was shortly deleted along with the chaotic video. “Why did Sofia Coppola’s daughter delete this. It’s art,” one Twitter user lamented. “Sofia Coppola’s daughter is how you do nepotism right,” another said.
Although the social media stunt has earned her a new legion of fans, it’s not the first time Romy has stepped into the public eye. In 2020, she made her modelling debut for cult Gen Z brand Heaven by Marc Jacobs, where she styled and shot all the photos for the campaign herself.
The shots were shared on the designer’s Instagram page, with Jacobs captioning the post: “I met you Romy shortly after you were born. It is a beautiful trip watching you grow up and becoming such a cool and beautiful young woman. These portraits of you take me back in spirit to those good old early ‘90s days where the beginning of a long and lasting love story first began.” He was referencing his relationship with her mother, whom he met shortly after his infamous ’92 grunge collection for Perry Ellis. The pair have since collaborated multiple times in the intervening two decades, with Coppola featuring in many of Jacobs’ campaigns.
That same year, Romy attended the Marc Jacobs Fall 2020 runway show during New York Fashion Week with her mother, where they watched pop star Miley Cyrus make a surprise performance. Romy has also lent her voice to Coppola’s film On The Rocks.
Considering her stunning film debut — albeit via TikTok — perhaps she’ll follow her mother into the industry eventually. Personally, I’d love to see helicopter-gate immortalised on the big screen. Or, at the very least, granted a sequel on the social media platform.
