Julia Roberts turns to the small screen
TORONTO — For her first starring role in TV with the new Amazon Prime Video series “Homecoming,” Julia Roberts defaulted to the world she was familiar with.
“We shot it like a film, we treated it like a film,” said Roberts, who also served as an executive producer and requested that “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail direct all episodes of the half-hour noir.
“We had all the scripts at the beginning. I tried to dress the television idea up as much as a movie as possible, just knowing that we were going to hit the ground running,” she added in an interview at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where “Homecoming” screened.
Launching Friday, “Homecoming” stars the Oscar-winning actress as a former caseworker from a top-secret transitional support centre for soldiers returning to civilian life. The story jumps between her time at the facility in 2018 and her current life in 2022, when she’s a waitress living with her mother, played by Sissy Spacek, and can’t remember anything about her former career.
Toronto native Stephan James co-stars as one of the soldiers who bonds with Roberts’s character, while Shea Whigham plays a Department of Defense auditor who investigates a mystery surrounding the facility, and Bobby Cannavale plays the facility’s head.
The cast also includes Jeremy Allen White, Alex Karpovsky, and Dermot Mulroney, who costarred with Roberts in the 1997 romantic comedy “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”
Roberts said the psychological thriller highlights the difficulties ex-soldiers face in trying to adjust to civilian life after they’ve “made the greatest sacrifice that a person can make.”
“They make these incredible sacrifices and then they come home and, from what I’ve read and watched and heard, become this invisible person,” said Roberts, who won an Oscar for best actress in 2000’s “Erin Brockovich.”
“You just become a civilian, so you’re one of many, as opposed to this incredibly special, unique, heralded human who risked everything for the rest of us just to be free to be in line at the grocery store. So, is there work that can be done? One-thousand per cent.”
James’s character is searching for a sense of belonging after his service, he said.
“I think you have so much purpose when you’re out doing a job like that, that when you come home, I’m sure that’s a scary thing, to see where you fit in,” said James, whose other projects have included the Jesse Owens biopic film “Race.”
“How do you normalize things? How do you just go on living, knowing what you have done and where you’re coming from?”
Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, who created the 30-minute podcast that inspired the series, also wrote and coproduced the small-screen adaptation.