News feed
She was the Queen of the 90s rom-com – from a call girl in Pretty Woman to a lovelorn BFF in My Best Friend’s Wedding. So Hollywood (and all of us) were baffled when Julia Roberts just stopped making the sorts of romantic comedies that made her – and her megawatt smile – famous. Now, the Oscar-winner has revealed why …. and it was because of the scripts.
“People sometimes misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by that I haven’t done a romantic comedy as my not wanting to do one,” Roberts told the New York Times. “If I had read something that I thought was that Notting Hill level of writing or My Best Friend’s Wedding level of madcap fun, I would do it. They didn’t exist until this movie that I just did that Ol Parker wrote and directed,” she added, referring to her upcoming film, Ticket to Paradise, which was shot mid-pandemic on the Gold Coast and co-stars George Clooney. “Lo and behold, George felt it only worked with me,” Roberts said. “Somehow we were both able to do it, and off we went.”
Asked by the New York Times if she turned down rom-coms because “there wasn’t a single good script, not one”, Roberts simply responded, “Yeah”. She continued: “Here’s the thing: If I’d thought something was good enough, I would have done it. But I also had three kids in the last 18 years. That raises the bar even more because then it’s not only ‘Is this material good?’ It’s also the math equation of my husband’s work schedule and the kids’ school schedule and summer vacation. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I think I want to do this.’ I have a sense of great pride in being home with my family and considering myself a homemaker.”
“As they get older, and particularly with my daughter, I do have a sense of responsibility for showing my children that I can be creative and that it’s meaningful to me — so meaningful that for periods of time I will choose to focus on that almost more than my family, which has been hard for me to come to terms with.”
And what about that rumour that Roberts’ smile is insured for $US30 million ($A40 million)? “No. What am I insuring it against?,” she told the New York Times. “How would you do that? … I mean, if my smile was insured, there would be someone at my house on a nightly basis saying, ‘You need to floss longer.’” Fair point, Julia.
