Julia Roberts names the single worst movie of her career: “It was a piece of shit”
There have not been many actors in the past half century with the star power of Julia Roberts. Most people point to her megawatt smile, but she also has a natural affinity for the camera in the same way that Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe did. It’s one of those things that you can’t manufacture or work hard enough to create. You’ve either got it or you don’t, and most people, even movie stars, don’t.
Roberts hasn’t just coasted on screen presence alone, though, at least not in the beginning. After nearly a decade of dazzling audiences in romantic comedies and zippy thrillers, she toned down the glamour for Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich and promptly won an Oscar. It was the culmination of a rapid rise to stardom that began with Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman, and it signalled that she was coming into her own as a dramatic actor.
Early in her career, however, Roberts had her fair share of duds. That’s inevitable when you’re the most sought-after star in town and the scripts are cascading into your agent’s office like a plague of locusts. Finding the diamonds in the rough, to use another metaphor, was probably impossible, and it’s a miracle that she got to do as many decent films as she did. But for every Pelican Brief and Notting Hill, there is an I Love Trouble, a film so bad that it makes Runaway Bride look like a stone-cold masterpiece.
Directed by Charles Shyer and released in 1994, I Love Trouble was a romantic thriller, a genre sweet spot for Roberts, in which she played a Chicago reporter who goes head-to-head with a reporter from a rival paper (Nick Nolte) to uncover a mystery surrounding a train wreck. Unfortunately, no one could begin to solve the mystery behind why this train wreck of a film was made.
Nolte and Roberts have zero chemistry, which was due in part to the strength of the script (when their characters meet for the first time, Nolte lamely quips, “I’m sorry, where did you say you’re from? Bitchville?”) but mostly to their actual hatred of each other off-screen. The feud between the stars has become legendary. Rumours about their mutual disgust leaked beyond the soundstages, and when asked about it later, they were surprisingly candid.
Roberts called Nolte “a disgusting human being,” while Nolte claimed, improbably, that she was “not a nice person.” The feud became so rancorous that reports claimed that some of their scenes had to be done with stunt doubles.
In a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair, Roberts disputed that last claim but made no effort to defend the film itself. “I don’t know what I’ve already said about I Love Trouble, other than that it was a piece of shit,” she concluded. “It’s no secret that Nick and I didn’t get along like a house on fire.”
Despite Roberts’s bankability at the time, the film was dead in the water when it was released, earning a mere $62 million and a merciless reception from critics.
