Julia Roberts Shared A Candid Confession That’s Left Fans Reeling

Roberts was one of the biggest stars in the world during the 1990s and early 2000s. She racked up rom-com hit after rom-com hit: Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding. Next she won her first and so far only Oscar, for the movie Erin Brockovich. And then Roberts seemingly started to fall off the radar.

It’s only in more recent years that she’s started getting back into high-profile projects. She’s the star of not one but two 2022 productions: the real-life political drama Gaslit alongside Sean Penn, and the rom-com Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney. Yes, finally — another rom-com.

Roberts has actually appeared in a rom-com during the past decade, but she was only one part of a big ensemble cast… and the film was absolutely not a hit. That movie was 2016’s Mother’s Day, directed by Pretty Woman’s Garry Marshall, and alas it has a mere eight percent approval rating on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

Both the movie and Roberts’ central role in it were absolutely slammed by critics across the board. The entertainment site IndieWire called it “one of the worst ensemble comedies ever made” and stated that “Roberts’ performance has a real ‘We all know that I owe Garry Marshall my star-making role’ quality to it.” Ouch.

Roberts didn’t necessarily lose out altogether, since she was paid a whopping $3 million for just four days of filming. But all the same, the dismal failure of Mother’s Day did cause Variety magazine to say, “It’s a reminder that Roberts’ days as an A-list star who could carry a movie on her own could be over.”

The 2010s weren’t all bad for Roberts though — you might remember her in August: Osage Country or The Normal Heart during those years. She even got an Academy Award nod for the former. And in 2018 Roberts starred for the first time in a TV show, Homecoming, in which she played a shrink.

Homecoming was a pretty big hit for Roberts — which came as a surprise to some critics. The Guardian wrote in 2018, “Here she was, late to the party, making her television debut half a decade after every other big-name star in Hollywood.” But the show, and Roberts, still won audiences over.

At the time, the website Vox commented, “Roberts’s performance intensifies as her character’s confusion grows, crescendoing to a fever pitch — and a sublime visual trick — that will induce gasps even if you can see it coming. It’s a reminder of why she’s one of the last real movie stars in an entertainment landscape where that label has become increasingly rare.”

But for such a big star, there’s still quite a significant gap in Roberts’ CV — a whole four years, in fact. Before Gaslit there was a period when audiences simply weren’t seeing her at all. So, what happened? Well, Roberts eventually spoke about it during a big 2022 interview with The New York Times.

Regarding her prolonged exit from Hollywood, the then 54-year-old actress told the paper, “It wasn’t by design so much as not finding something that I was interested in. I was surprised how quickly the years seemed to go by.” And a year of no publicity, good or bad, is an eternity in Hollywood.

Was ageism to blame for Roberts no longer finding roles she was interested in? That possibility had certainly been raised before. There’s been discussion for many years about how Hollywood actresses over 50 years old tend to get only supporting roles — and often not very well-written ones at that.

In 2020 a study was released by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in conjunction with the brand TENA, and it concluded that 50+ women were poorly represented in Hollywood. The investigation declared, “Older adults are stereotyped as mentally feeble or senile, inflexible in thought and manner, and old-fashioned in morality and skills” — with women faring the worst.

Many Hollywood actresses have spoken about their irritation with this state of affairs. Jessica Lange told AARP magazine in 2017, “You don’t often see women in their 60s playing romantic leads, yet you will see men in their 60s playing romantic leads with co-stars who are decades younger.” Indeed, Roberts is 18 years younger than her Pretty Woman co-star Richard Gere.

And yet, Roberts has been adamant that she doesn’t believe ageism is an issue in Hollywood. During a 2018 interview with the website I News, she said, “I don’t think anybody buys into that. I don’t think I am special. I’ve always been fortunate that I have found the work I am looking for. I mean, 30 years is a long time — and I am grateful and satisfied.”

Her career’s far from the only thing Roberts is grateful and satisfied about, though. She’s started a family since her rom-com days. Roberts has three children altogether — twins Finn and Hazel, and her youngest Henry — with her partner, cinematographer Danny Moder. The kids are all now in their teens.

Roberts may love acting, but she also loves being a mom and wife. “There’s no way to describe it without sounding sappy or ridiculous, because everything in my mind ends with an exclamation point. And the thing is, we have these three human beings who are just a complete reflection of the affection we have for each other,” she said to InStyle magazine during 2017.

Roberts even ended up moving her kids away from Hollywood so they could have a more normal life. In 2020 she bought a massive, and massively expensive, property in an upmarket part of San Francisco. An anonymous friend told Closer magazine that Roberts wanted her kids “to have the experience of a city with a different energy and vibe.”

The friend said that Roberts’ husband Moder had “also grown tired of Hollywood,” so the couple agreed a move was the best option. The pal continued, “There’s a new scene for them to explore and although they’re both working less, it’s still less than an hour’s flight to LA.”

Roberts talked about her family, and her wishes for them, in that 2022 The New York Times piece. She revealed, “I almost didn’t do August: Osage County because they were going to start filming right as our youngest son was starting kindergarten. And I was like, ‘How could I miss this?’”

Asked about her work “from a business perspective rather than a family perspective,” Roberts replied, “I’ve never put the work in a place of, ‘Doing this part, what will people think?’ I read it. I want it or I don’t want it. That’s how I’ve made my decisions for 50 or whatever movies.”

And Roberts was extremely excited about the new rom-com she was doing with George Clooney, Ticket to Paradise. When asked by the interviewer, “Was it easy to stretch the rom-com muscles again?” she answered right away, “The good news is yes. I love to laugh and be funny.”

“You get into that mode of those endorphins going off when you’re clever and people going, ‘Oh!’” the actress added. “Then that becomes this automatic thing, where you’re always thinking in terms of creating fun. It’s a joy to play in that sandbox. It has been a long time.”

The famous Roberts smile also came up. When the interviewer enquired as to whether she could still do it “without any self-consciousness,” Roberts said, “If something’s funny, I’m going to laugh. If something’s not funny, nothing’s going to make me laugh. I would probably get a lot further in my career if I had more control over those things.”

But the big question was right there: why’d the woman who loved to laugh stopped doing romantic comedies, the genre that made her famous? And the answer was simple: there hadn’t been a single rom-com script in all that time that Roberts had seen and loved enough to want to do it.

“People sometimes misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by that I haven’t done a romantic comedy as my not wanting to do one,” Roberts explained. “If I had read something that I thought was that Notting Hill level of writing or My Best Friend’s Wedding level of madcap fun, I would do it.”

Only Ticket to Paradise proved to be, well, her ticket. Roberts admitted, “But even with that, I thought, ‘Well, disaster,’ because this only works if it’s George Clooney. Lo and behold, George felt it only worked with me. Somehow we were both able to do it, and off we went.”

The interviewer seemed a little shocked that Roberts hadn’t had a single good rom-com script in all those years. But unfortunately for fans of the genre, many people believe it’s been dying off for a long time. Even Nancy Meyers, one of the directors most closely linked to the style, thinks so.

Meyers, who co-wrote the 1994 Roberts film I Love Trouble, told Vulture magazine in 2020, “Once superhero movies really became the only movie studios cared about, the experience of making a movie like mine changed.” She said in the same interview that she wasn’t planning to make any more films.

There’s also the feeling that most of the people who made rom-coms what they were are just too old for the genre now. Roberts’ Notting Hill co-star Hugh Grant told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in 2020, “I think it’s just that I got old and ugly, and I'm not appropriate for romantic comedy films anymore, which has been a great blessing.”

And Roberts herself has brought this up. In 2018 at a promotional event for Homecoming she admitted to Entertainment Tonight, “There came a point in my career where people thought I had turned on romantic comedies, which I love. I love to be in them, I love to watch them.”

Roberts added, “But sometimes, they just don’t work at a certain point of life experience. It’s not about age, it’s just about what people know that you know.” But, she said, she was very much open to perhaps playing one of “the parents of the people that are rom-com-ing.”

And that’s pretty much exactly what Ticket to Paradise is! According to Variety, the Ol Parker-directed movie “follows two divorced parents who rush to Bali to stop their teenage daughter from rushing into an unwise marriage, like their own.” It’s due for release towards the end of 2022.

Of course, no one can know yet how well the movie will do, either with critics or at the box office. But plenty think there’ll be more rom-coms — and ones that are actually good — in the near future. Early in 2022 Parade magazine ran an article about how the genre wasn’t actually as troubled as it’d seemed.

Scott Meslow, the author of From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (And Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy, told the magazine, “Over the past decade or so, the studios really were making fewer romantic comedies — but the genre seems to be on the rise again at the studio level.”

Los Angeles Times film critic Kimber Myers weighed in, “The legacy studios are definitely making fewer romantic comedies than they were 20-30 years ago during the genre’s modern heyday. And that’s largely because they stopped being such a sure bet at the box office.” Roberts herself was once one of those sure bets, of course.

Myers also mentioned that Netflix rom-coms have tended to succeed. He commented, “The fact that these movies are doing so well with Gen Z gives me hope for the future of the genre, though I don’t know if it will translate to the big screen, since younger audiences’ viewing habits are different than previous generations.” But either way, there are openings there — especially for actresses such as Roberts.

There was of course another reason why she’s stayed out of the rom-com game. Roberts told The New York Times, “Here’s the thing: if I’d thought something was good enough, I would have done it. But I also had three kids in the last 18 years. That raises the bar even more, because then it’s not only ‘Is this material good?’”

Roberts continued, “I do have a sense of responsibility for showing my children that I can be creative and that it’s meaningful to me — so meaningful that for periods of time I will choose to focus on that almost more than my family, which has been hard for me to come to terms with.”

And Roberts is very optimistic about her future in Hollywood, especially in light of her recent work such as Ticket to Paradise. She said, “I’m living my acting dreams.” So it’s all good news for her diehard fans — hopefully she’s far from done with the romantic comedy yet.