USA TODAY International Edition

The ‘Homecoming’ queen

For Roberts, roles about searches are polar opposites

- Patrick Ryan

Spoiler alert! Contains major details about the end of “Homecoming” Season 1 on Amazon Prime.

NEW YORK – You won’t see much of Julia Roberts’ famous megawatt smile in her latest onscreen outings.

In Peter Hedges’ drama “Ben Is Back” (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands to additional cities through December), the Oscar-winning actress delivers one of her most moving performanc­es yet as the solicitous Holly, whose son Ben (Lucas Hedges), a recovering opioid addict, shows up on the family doorstep on Christmas Eve and asks to spend the holiday together.

It’s a 180-degree turn from her role in Amazon Prime’s twisty, 10-episode “Homecoming” (now streaming) as the reticent and at times terrifying Heidi Bergman, who is hired as the lead administra­tor of a mysterious operation for returning veterans. But when she learns the government-sponsored Homecoming program’s true intentions – to wipe soldiers’ traumatic memories using experiment­al drugs and redeploy them – she rebels by administer­ing the medication to herself and her favorite patient Walter Cruz (Stephan James), who becomes unresponsi­ve and returns home after she gives him an overdose.

Roberts, 51, chats with USA TODAY about both projects.

Question: What drew you to “Ben Is Back,” reading the script for the first time?

Julia Roberts: Peter did an incredible thing in (tackling) something that’s so big and prevalent (such as addiction) and writing about it in a way that’s so contained and fragile and complex and humanizing.

Q: Is there an aspect of parenting or addiction that you think this film really gets right?

Roberts: That you just cannot know what people are truly going through. As a parent, I say that to my children very often. Just as an observatio­n, they’ll say, “Oh, this person behaves this way,” so we try to have those family conversati­ons where you say: “You just don’t know (why). That might be the result of something really sad or a real insecurity.” So I sat in a place of constant nonjudgmen­t of what Holly or Ben, for that matter, were doing for a lot of the film.

Roberts: Ultimately, I just played them both with absolute earnestnes­s. Heidi at the facility is like a Girl Scout: She really believes that she can effect change and that on paper, this is a really beautiful idea that would actually take care of those who have made the greatest sacrifice for us.

The soldiers would come back and we would take them into this space, help them catch their breath and put their compass back toward home . ... Then this sinister element comes into it and makes it dystopian.

The later Heidi is a shell of a person, and only a very small amount of her realizes what a shell she is. (But) that’s the part that latches on.

Q: I wanted to talk about the last scene of the season. When Heidi finally tracks down Walter at a diner near Yosemite in 2022, she chooses not to show him the old map he gave her and tell him who she is. Was it merely enough to see he was doing OK?

Roberts: We talked about this scene probably more than any other. We’ve just gone through so much, so how do we (wrap) this up without a ribbon, but with clarity and with what we all felt was really happening?

For me, it was important to work out the whole thing with the map. If (Walter) was going to remember – or if he even could remember – I wanted it to be more on his terms.

I wanted it to be gentle and kind, as opposed to “This will make you remember!” For Heidi, when she sees that he is happy and seems so well, making that selfless choice of putting the map away was pretty important.

 ?? MARK SCHAFER/AP ?? Julia Roberts’ son (Lucas Hedges) returns home from drug rehab in “Ben Is Back.”
MARK SCHAFER/AP Julia Roberts’ son (Lucas Hedges) returns home from drug rehab in “Ben Is Back.”
 ?? JESSICA BROOKS/AMAZON ?? Heidi (Roberts) forms a particular­ly strong bond with patient Walter Cruz (Stephan James) in “Homecoming.”
JESSICA BROOKS/AMAZON Heidi (Roberts) forms a particular­ly strong bond with patient Walter Cruz (Stephan James) in “Homecoming.”

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