A TALE OF TWO JULIAS Hollywood icon Julia Roberts on her latest roles
The fabulous A-lister opens up about her family, taking on emotional roles and why she thinks politics is ‘ bulls--t’
Let’s call it a jubilee!” Julia Roberts quips when reminded that this year is the 30th anniversary of her big-screen debut in 1988’s Satisfaction. The film is mostly forgettable, save for being the star’s first major role. But what followed
was hit after hit: Pretty Woman, Sleeping with the Enemy, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting
Hill, Erin Brockovich, Wonder. So a lavish anniversary gala isn’t that far out of left field.
“I’ve been saying [I’ve been working] 30 years for 20 years,” jokes the 51-year-old actress. “No, it feels like an accomplishment. If you made watches for 30 years, you would be proud of that.” While she has yet to unveil a Julia Roberts line of timepieces, the Oscar winner does have two projects that are already garnering acclaim and awards talk.
The actress takes on her first major TV series role as a caseworker on Amazon Prime Video’s paranoia-thriller Homecoming (streaming now). Then she plays a mother struggling to keep her drug-addicted son clean and sober in Ben is Back (out on Jan. 31). Both roles are complicated women but hinge on Roberts’ innate likeability.
“Her baseline of charisma and talent is so high that her real skill is being able to not have anything diminish that,” says Homecoming co-star and good friend Dermot Mulroney. Adds Back writer-director Peter Hedges, “She’s a movie star who happens to be a great actress, and that’s not always the case.”
Roberts filmed both projects within weeks of each other, and now they’re being released in similar proximity. “I feel like it would be nice if they came out a little further apart so I could rest on my laurels a bit,” she admits over a salmon wrap at a Malibu restaurant.
“At press conferences, one person will ask you something about Homecoming and then you get super-invested in that whole idea, and then someone else asks a question about Ben is Back, and so it’s a little dizzying.”
So you don’t get similar whiplash, we took the liberty of giving you two Julia stories for the price of one. It all began with a soccer game.
1 FAMILY MATTERS BEN IS BACK
To help prepare for the harrowing family drama Ben is Back, Roberts invited director Peter Hedges, his son and star Lucas, and actress Kathryn Newton, who plays Roberts’ daughter, to her family’s home in Malibu last year to rehearse. (Roberts and her husband, cinematographer Danny Moder, are the parents of twins Phinnaeus [Finn] and Hazel, 13, and Henry, 11.) Remembers Roberts, “I said, ‘Before you come to my house, take down this address. It’s a park. Why don’t you meet us there at 8.30?’ My older son, Finn, had a soccer game. We had such a blast. Peter was the best sidelines cheerleader. And then we went to our house and cooked a bunch of food.”
The group grew so close that Lucas spent Thanksgiving with Roberts’ family. “She has been a cultural touchstone for such a long time, but her family is really grounded,” says Lucas. “It really was a family Thanksgiving dinner.” Family is at the heart of Back, which takes place over an intense 24 hours when opioid addict Ben (Lucas Hedges) leaves rehab and returns home for Christmas Eve. His mother, Holly (Roberts), is thrilled to see her son but terrified at the thought of him sliding back into old habits. After their family dog goes missing, Holly and her son set out on a mission to find him while battling Ben’s old demons. “I love the idea of exploring a character who would not give up – and will not give up – on her child,” says Peter Hedges. “I kinda used Orpheus as a jumping off point: the notion of someone who loves someone so much, they’ll go into the underworld to bring them back. To give them life.
To keep them alive. And who better to go into the underworld to bring her child back than Julia Roberts?”
It’s a gut-wrenching story, but that is what made Roberts want to do it. Says the actress: “There were no easy days, but I’ve kind of realised that’s the way that I like it. If I’m going to leave my family, because we shot this during the school year, who wants easy days?” Roberts’ performance is fuelled by love and anger, especially in a scene where Holly confronts Ben when she thinks he’s using drugs again. “I damaged my hand, actually,” she says. “I don’t think it’s in the movie, but I really kind of beat the shit out of Lucas in that dressing room, and I wasn’t imagining that was the way the scene was going to go, and I don’t think he was either.” [ Laughs] Recalls Lucas, “She went hard, so credit to her.”
Roberts hopes the movie puts a human face on a crisis that often seems inaccessible. “There’s not a good guy and a bad guy, and every right choice on a Monday is the wrong choice on a Tuesday,” she says. “I think it just shows how truly impossible it is to judge. People think, ‘Oh, well, you wouldn’t find me in a situation like that as a parent or as a person.’ I think it just brings it all back to a place of great humility, where it can happen to anyone, and it does happen.”
2 A NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY HOMECOMING
“Welcome home, bro! It’s good to see you.” It’s a warm March day on the Los Angeles set of Homecoming, far away from the tundra of upstate New York, and Roberts, playing caseworker Heidi, is high-fiving her patient Walter (Stephan James).
Heidi is taking the recently returned soldier through some role-playing activities to help him re-acclimatise to life at home, hence the bro-tastic scenario. It’s a deceptively cheery scene for a series that is a conspiracy thriller in the vein of The Manchurian Candidate. Production is about halfway through the 10-episode first season, with Mr Robot’s Sam Esmail helming all of the episodes. Creators Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg sit behind the
monitors, clearly in awe of their leading lady. “I don’t think you get her. I think she [chooses] you,” says Horowitz of Roberts signing on to the series. Based on the 2016 Gimlet podcast of the same name (Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac voiced Heidi and Walter, respectively), Homecoming is about the titular program whose Florida facility purports to house and help soldiers who have recently returned from war. But flash forward four years into the future, and Heidi is a waitress living with her mother (Sissy Spacek) and has zero memory of her time at Homecoming.
What happened to Heidi? And what’s Homecoming’s real goal? Cue heavy Alfred Hitchcock vibes, complete with dizzying stairwell views, one-take tracking shots, and off-centre camera angles. “Julia has that warmth that she can just flip on, and you feel it so strong,” says Horowitz. “It’s especially useful because Heidi’s put in these situations where she’s having to be repressed or gloomy or stressed. You can feel the tragedy of this woman being caged. We’re not used to seeing Julia Roberts get intimidated or bullied.” Roberts, who had dipped her toe into the TV pool with appearances on Friends and Murphy Brown and Ryan Murphy’s HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart, was captivated when her agents sent her the podcast. “I felt like it hearkened to the radio
shows, where everyone sits around in the living room just listening, and I thought it was done so well,” she says. “It was so evocative.” Plus, she was impressed with what people like Cary Joji Fukunaga ( True Detective) and good friend Steven Soderbergh ( The Knick) had done in the TV space. Esmail, who has a deal with Universal Cable Productions, was in New York at the time and suggested a Skype chat, which was Roberts’ first meeting of that type. (Erstwhile Luddite Roberts also just joined Instagram a few months ago and says her teens think her posts are uncool.)
“My face is completely in shadow – I look like I’m in the witness protection program,” she recalls. “So I’m running all around the house because he’s gonna call me any second on this thing.” Shadows be damned, the pair hit it off. “We connected in this deeper way... We just had this instant friendship,” says Esmail. “And, honestly, we didn’t even talk about the project for the first 45 minutes of the conversation. We were just talking about our lives and her family and my wedding” (Esmail married Shameless star Emmy Rossum in 2017). Roberts’ one request was that Esmail direct all 10 of Homecoming’s episodes and that all the scripts would be written in advance. While the podcast consisted of mostly taped therapy sessions between Heidi and Walter, plus phone calls with Heidi’s arrogant
boss, Colin (David Schwimmer in the podcast; Bobby Cannavale on the TV show), Esmail brings a striking visual style to the series, paying homage to directors like Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, and Alan J. Pakula. The series also diverges from the podcast in many ways, including a bulked-up subplot for Cannavale’s Colin and a different climax.
“I would say that was the trickiest part: deciding when to just do it like it was on the podcast and when to do something different,” Bloomberg says. Of the final scene, Roberts says: “It’s like, ‘ Who shot J.R.?’ You want to spend all summer talking about that kind of thing. It’s nice for something to end in a way that has all kinds of pathways it can potentially pick back up with.”