The movie Julia Roberts regrets making: “I was not as satisfied as I could have been”
If you like Oscar-bait dramas, you’ve probably seen Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, for which she got a nod from the Academy. If you like heist movies, you may or may not know her from the Oceans movies, where she played George Clooney’s love interest and had almost no lines. If romantic comedies are your thing, you probably know her from too many movies to remember and very few that are worth watching. You’ll swiftly run out of fingers counting them if you’re trying to pin down Julia Roberts to a certain type of movie.
Roberts’ is a long and storied career with many highs. But there’s a film she regrets. Who doesn’t have their toes curl looking back at some of their choices? It seemed like a good idea at the time, right? Julia Roberts has usually been pretty smart with regard to picking roles, but she said that her lead role in 1991’s Dying Young was a mistake.
At this time, Julia Roberts was regarded as akin to any starlet whose name is engraved into cultural memory. Signing her was supposed to mean a box office guarantee written in cursive.
Roberts was asked by EW: “When it didn’t do as well as some had predicted, do you think some industry people saw it as a reflection on you?” to which Roberts replied, “I have no idea, but I also find it very curious, people talking about Dying Young as sort of this bomb. Because I was in it, it had this great expectation tagged on it, because Sleeping With the Enemy made so much money and Pretty Woman made so much money.”
Roberts, at the time sitting pretty at the crest of Hollywood, laments “So because a movie I was in did not make over $100million, it was a bomb.” as her name held so much cache, Dying Young was classified as a dud. For anyone else, executives would have written themselves a bonus. But this was Julia Roberts in 1991. The rules were different.
As to the quality of the movie? It’s always subjective with sentimental rom-coms. They follow one of the strictest genre architectures captured on camera. Opposites attract, opposites dislike each other, opposites fall in love and then dislike each other again. And then fall in love again. Whether you find it saccharine or sentimental, touching or nauseating is entirely in the eyes of the filmgoer. Most didn’t like this one, though.
This structure is fine with the right actors and scripts, but Julia Roberts herself thought Dying Young could have been better. EW asked her “but you were not entirely happy with it either?” to which she retorted “I felt like it could have been a better movie.” and claimed they “filmed a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the movie”. Not even Julia Roberts gets final cut. She goes on to claim “Because the fact is, you know, it made, like, $33million, and people forget — $33million is a lot of money.”
To her point, any person who doesn’t think $33million is a lot of money probably doesn’t pay to go to the cinema anyway.
