Roberts’ new TV series gets big-screen treatment
Psychological thriller focuses on difficulties faced by ex-soldiers
TORONTO
For her first starring role in TV with the new Amazon Prime Video series Homecoming, Julia Roberts defaulted to the world she was well 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.
“I wanted to be as prepared as I could be, I wanted to have as much confidence and comfort as I could have in this new endeavour.”
Launching today, Homecoming stars the Oscarwinning 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 U.S. Department of Defence 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.
Esmail said Roberts “jumped onboard pretty early on” after he reached out to her. He was a “massive fan of hers” and intimidated, he admitted, but Roberts was genial and shared the same vision for the show.
“She was involved in every step of the process — from the writing to the production to post. She looks at every cut,” said Esmail. “The good thing about her is, because she is so down-toearth, she acts like she’s one of our team members. She’s not acting like a holier-than-thou diva or anything like that.
“She was barely in her trailer while we were shooting. She’s always on set just [chatting] with the crew members and me, and sometimes just sits next to video village while there are still 45 minutes before the lighting is set up. So it was just great having that kind of presence around.”