COVER STORY: EXCLUSIVE!

Julia Roberts chats to us about her new movie, Ben is Back, the dystopian TV series Homecoming and family rituals…

Julia Roberts answers our questions

julia Roberts enters a room like a stealth bomber, unobtrusive yet impressive; impossible to ignore. Today she's wearing a black Yves St. Laurent suit with red patent leather Christian Louboutin school-flats. Her honeycomb-blonde hair is pulled up in a chic high pony with the side parting she seems to favour for big events. Humungous glasses perch on her nose. Going incognito? Hardly. On another face the hair and lenses might be too much, but somehow the frames accentuate the überrecognisable delicate features and that famous smile.

Tall and lithe, with a famous mane and an even more famous laugh, this southern belle and mother of three might be the darling of Hollywood for four decades now, but respect for her talent was hard-won initially. Showing true grit, she rejected the prejudice and pigeonholing that invariably dog the truly beautiful in Tinseltown, staying true to her family ethic of hard work and constant evolution.

Though fiercely private, she has in recent years given us glimpses of a multifaceted woman juggling superstardom while holding together a warm, no-fuss household. In Toronto, recently, while promoting two weighty projects – her movie,

Ben is Back, and a TV series, Homecoming – Julia revealed something most working women can identify with: the need for family members to seek each other out upon their arrival home, just to say hello and touch base.

‘I don't travel as much as I did,' she says, ‘but on a daily basis… whenever someone comes into the house they have to find anybody else who's there to say they're home – and a hug and a kiss and a hi. And the same with leaving… I think those rituals are infinitely impactful. I don't like discovering that someone's home and they haven't come to announce it to me. So that's something all of us try to always do.'

From growing her own veggies and herbs to knitting up a storm and personally trumpeting passion projects like last year's movie, Wonder, it's evident that there's more to this Pretty Woman than meets the eye.

‘

I don’t travel as much as I did – but just on a daily basis… whenever someone comes into the house they have to find anybody else who’s there to say that they’re home – and a hug and

’ a kiss and a hi.