Being Julia: the woman behind the smile

From her breakthrough performance in Pretty Woman to her Oscar-winning role as Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts has always captivated audiences with her talent, warmth and natural beauty. On the eve of her 50th birthday, the actress speaks to Bazaar about

time had such a glittering run, so much so that every actress since then whose sheer likeability has shot them to stardom at an early age – most notably Jennifer Lawrence – has been dubbed, at some point, ‘the next Julia Roberts’.

And yet, here she is insisting that it’s not such a big deal. What advice would she give the next Julia Roberts? ‘Aim higher, right?’ And no, she has no nanny or butler, and certainly no cook (she loves cooking). ‘I think people confuse the idea of having this fantastical job with somehow being a fantastical individual,’ she says. ‘Like, “How could you possibly make breakfast?” Well, hunger is a good motivator!’

So she shops for her own groceries? ‘Of course. It’s a thing of make-believe that I can’t buy toilet paper, because of course I can.’ And she doesn’t get mobbed? ‘I don’t attract that energy. I get more of “Psst, I have to tell you something. People tell me my daughter looks just like you.”’ She beams. (The sheer breadth of that smile!) ‘Or my favourite, “You look just like Julia Roberts.” Mm-hmm. “Are you Julia Roberts?” Yes. “No you’re not!”’

I sympathise with this anecdotal shopper. Because it takes a moment to adjust to the idea that Julia Roberts, the biggest star of my generation, is more or less a full-time mother. It’s like learning that Brad Pitt spends most of his time on his allotment. It’s jarring. Yet Roberts seems so content as the homemaker that acting has rather receded.

She rarely pursues roles any more; her sights aren’t set on this goal or that. ‘I just wait to see what comes along, as opposed to looking for it,’ she says. ‘It makes it fun and organic.’ Even then, ‘there’s an almost unfair bar that a script has to attain for me to say “I’m going to pack everything up for this.”’ And that’s presuming she’s not questioning her profession in general. ‘Sometimes I think, “I’m pretending my name is Jane and I work at a bank. That’s kinda silly – I’m a grown-up woman!”’ When I ask if she has considered giving up acting, she laughs. ‘Well, if I did much less, I wouldn’t be in the business at all. I was saying to my husband the other day that I haven’t worked in almost a year.’

Yet, there is work, and some of it is extraordinary. August: Osage County in 2013 was a tour de force, and her performance in 2015’s Secret in Their Eyes deserved more recognition. This year, Amazon has announced a new TV series, Homecoming, a psychological thriller in which Roberts plays a caseworker at a secret government facility. And in November, her movie Wonder comes out, also starring Owen Wilson, a soft-hearted sentimental story about a plucky boy navigating life with a facial deformity. The book on which it is based tugged at her maternal side. She read it to her kids and husband at bedtime. ‘It’s incredible, the way it helps children find their way toward compassion and empathy without teaching them directly,’ she says. As it happened, the movie rights were held by David Holberman, her former producer on Pretty Woman. ‘We met for lunch, and he gave me the job!’

Wonder and Pretty Woman, though poles apart, each reflect Roberts’ life at the time. In Wonder, she’s a devoted mother in a wholesome family whose principal focus is her children – which she is – and in Pretty Woman, she’s a sexy ingénue whose LA dreams come true – just as they did in real life (thanks largely to Pretty Woman). There are better films on her CV, but Pretty Woman had the greatest impact on her. It gave her life an irresistible fairy-tale aspect, at which she still marvels, 27 years on. ‘At my age,’ she says, ‘it takes on a bit of a dreamlike quality.’

She’s the girl, after all, from a broken home in small-town Georgia who moved to New York after high school in the mid-Eighties. Her goals were modest – a part on a long-forgotten show Spenser: For Hire.

‘I think people

confuse the idea of having this fantastical job with being a fantastical individual’

Then came Mystic Pizza, her proper break. ‘I wanted that job so much and then I got it, and I was like, um…’ She flaps her hands and bites her lip. ‘This is great, don’t get me wrong, but… I don’t know what to do! Luckily, there was a whole gang of us who felt the same way.’

So began a dizzying run through Steel Magnolias right up to Erin Brockovich, the performance of a lifetime. Who can forget the scene when Roberts arrives at Edward Masry’s law firm in a neck brace demanding a job, creating a scene, and then quietly pleading, ‘Don’t make me beg’? It was the year 2000, she was 33, an Oscar winner and the highest-paid actress in the world. She’d been engaged to Kiefer Sutherland, married to Lyle Lovett, and she was dating Benjamin Bratt. She had our full attention.

What was it like to be at the heart of all that? ‘Your compass does spin a bit,’ she says, shooing the topic aside. So it is whenever I make reference to her enormous success or her fame – she parries and minimises, returning again to her theme of Julia as a regular mother. And yet she can’t possibly be a regular mother – she’s Julia Roberts! While plenty of celebrities dread interviews, Roberts, I suspect, dreads them more than most.

What she can say is that even in the thick of it, she learnt a lesson that has served her ever since: don’t say yes to things just because you’re afraid the well might dry up. ‘Remember why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s your anchor. Cultivate your taste and decisionmaking. I didn’t work for a couple of years in my twenties, because I was being offered scripts and thinking “Is it me or is this all just crap?” I figured I could cover my rent and wait for something good. I’d been spoilt with some great jobs already, so I was like, “Why do that part with that person, when I was just doing this part with these people?”’

Remarkably, her twenties were relatively angst-free, at least in terms of her career. ‘In a business where people can be very competitive and ambitious, I had a strange lack of those emotions,’ she says. ‘When I didn’t get a job, I’d think, “Of course! I would have picked her too! ” I really believed it all had a purpose.’ She has faith in destiny – how could she not? There was never any plan for world domination, no need. ‘My methodology is not to really have a methodology, and it worked. I have a very strong intuition, I’ve always gone with my gut on things.’

It made her happy to become the highest-paid actress, nonetheless: ‘It was ridiculously wonderful having come from where I’d come from.’ But as for the current disputes over pay disparities in Hollywood, she’d sooner stay out of it. ‘I put down my stone in a path that will keep going, and I’m proud of that, but I don’t feel it’s my place to bang that drum at this time. I just don’t get all crazy over things. I have a maternal approach: “OK, everybody settle down, we’ll figure this out.”’

Is it hard to come down from such a high? She seems so unencumbered by the anxieties that often afflict the successful, who can fret that they’ve passed their prime, and struggle to maintain that same level of profile or relevance.

She leans forward, as though to share a secret. ‘Deep down, we all know you can’t stand on the top point of a pinnacle on your tiptoes, and not at some point lose your balance, or get tired, or say, “OK, somebody else take over, I have to go to the bathroom.” There are great things I’ve accomplished in my career and I’d be happy to accomplish more, of course, to impress my children and my husband. But you know what? I’ve been spoilt already.’

Roberts turns 50 this month, which seems like an excellent vantage point from which to reflect on her astonishing life, its highs and lows, how it has shaped her. But she’d rather not.

‘Too much thinking and pondering, it’s exhausting to me. Because we’re still moving forward, aren’t we? I mean, I suppose I’ll look back when I’m 90 and living at the motion-picture home.’ She bursts out laughing. ‘That was what Garry Marshall [the director of Pretty Woman] used to say. He’d take Polaroids on set and say, “When I’m in the motion-picture home, I’m going to have a scrapbook, and say, this is what I used to do, these are my friends!”’

After filming Eat, Pray, Love in 2009, she revealed that she’d embraced Hinduism, and there does seem something Eastern in the way she neither plans for the future, nor reflects on her past, her belief in destiny and intuition, not to mention her frequent use of the word ‘energetically’.

But of course she has changed; she became a mother. When she was younger, she says: ‘I was my priority, a selfish little brat running around making films.’ Now she lives for her family. Only that change took place not when she had children, but two years beforehand. ‘It was meeting Danny,’ she says, almost getting tearful. ‘Finding my person. When I think about what makes my life my life, and make sense and just shine inside of me, it’s him. Everything has come from that for me.’

Roberts’ quest to find Mr Right was front-page news for over a decade – a string of high-profile attempts ran aground for one reason or another. But then, on the set of The Mexican, Moder was behind the camera. And since then, they’ve worked on several films together, often at her specific request. ‘There’s comfort there, but also terror,’ she says, ‘which is a good combination. Terror because the person I want to impress most is looking right at me.’

And just as she’s considering afresh quite how lucky she is to have the family she’s got, her children come bounding into the trailer. Impeccably behaved, they all introduce themselves, one by one, and help themselves to cookies, while Roberts slips into doting-mother mode. In a few hours, she’ll be back home where she’s happiest, at the kitchen counter making dinner. Maybe there’s a script on her desk, maybe not – domestic Roberts has other creative outlets, thank you very much. The homemade pasta she turned out the other day, she says, made her so excited she was ‘vibrating’.

I tell her that it looks like a life well planned, a career that soared to its highest reach, then a settling down, a switch in priorities. And she smiles her warmest smile. ‘Well, I wish I could take credit for the planning… It was a kind of higgledy-piggledy destiny thing, but it all worked out.’

And as we stand to say goodbye, I actually believe for a moment that Julia Roberts, America’s Sweetheart, really is just one of us. But only for a moment.

‘Wonder’ is released nationwide on 1 December.

Pretty Woman gave her life an irresistible fairy-tale aspect, at which she still marvels, 27 years on