All About Sofia Coppola’s Husband Thomas Mars

Director Sofia Coppola has helmed a lot of films about young women finding their way in life, and it seems like she speaks from experience. After a marriage to fellow director Spike Jonze in her twenties, she connected with a musician named Thomas Mars whom she first met while working on one of her most iconic films, The Virgin Suicides.

They’ve now been together for 12 years and share two children. They’re not shy when it comes to discussing their relationship, but they rarely make a big splash on the red carpet, so some fans might not be as familiar with the musician. Here’s everything to know about Sofia Coppola’s husband Thomas Mars.

Who is Thomas Mars?

Mars is originally from France, growing up close to the Palace of Versailles, which is just a short train ride from Paris. The Palace is a well-known tourist destination, filled with history and art connected to French royalty (including one of Coppola’s muses, Marie Antoinette). But Mars wasn’t exactly thrilled about his neighborhood growing up. He told Vulture in 2020, “I lived in a museum. The frustration we had was that everything great happened in the past, and they wouldn’t give the chance for anything new to happen.”

He also told NPR that he “refused” to go inside the landmark while growing up, but would sneak into the grounds at night as a teen. Being so close to art history did seem to rub off on him in some ways—Mars is a very successful musical artist as the frontman for the band Phoenix, which also includes Christian Mazzalai, Laurent Brancowitz, and Deck D’Arcy. They’ve released seven studio albums and their fourth record, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 2010.

Mars did get into college, but dropped out after four days and got right back to music making. He and the group have been together since 1996, but they apparently have been working together way longer. He told The Creative Independent in 2017, “We were really about 10 years old when we started doing things. Apart from bartending, music is the only thing I know how to do.”

There’s something else that Coppola and Mars have in common: He’s also related to a famous person in media, as the nephew of famed German writer Hellmuth Karasek. Mars says that Karasek supported Phoenix before his passing in 2015.

“One of the first shows that we played in Versailles a lot of people didn’t really care for the band,” Mars said “And I remember at the end of that show he was the first one who started clapping. He knew the potential.”

How did Coppola and Mars meet?

Mars played drums and sang on the track “Playground Love” for Coppola's 1999 movie The Virgin Suicides, and they met on set. She was married to director Spike Jonze at the time, but they eventually divorced in 2003. That was the same year Coppola’s film Lost in Translation was released, and Mars’ band contributed a song to it as well as music for Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled. The entire band even makes a brief appearance in the film Marie Antoinette, playing lutes.

For her 2023 movie Priscilla, Coppola was not granted the rights to Elvis Presley’s music for the soundtrack, so Phoenix wrote the score and added a cover of Frankie Avalon’s “Venus.”

“It’s hard to differentiate the work from the private life, but I’ve always felt a really strong connection watching her movies,” Mars told Dazed in 2017. “There are things in her movies that only make sense once you see them.”

How long have they been married?

The couple announced their engagement in May 2011 and were married on Aug. 27, 2011. The wedding was held at a villa in Southern Italy that Coppola’s grandparents were raised in. It was a civil ceremony officiated by the town’s mayor, and her father Francis Ford Coppola walked her down the aisle.

Do Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars have children?

Their first daughter, Romy Mars, was born in 2006, and they welcomed their second daughter, Cosima Mars, in 2010. Apparently, one of the couple’s hard rules is no public social media, but Romy went viral after breaking the rule on TikTok in March 2023. She told a story in a now deleted clip about trying to charter a helicopter to have dinner with a friend in Maryland and using her dad’s credit card.

Of the incident, Coppola told THR, “She’s funny. But people discussing my parenting publicly is not what I would’ve hoped for.”

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