The movie that saved Julia Roberts from Hollywood exile: “I hadn’t worked in a long time”
Having been one of cinema’s biggest stars for over three decades, Julia Roberts has long since reached a point where she’s able to pick and choose her roles, and she’s become more selective than ever.
The Academy Award winner has only appeared in three movies since 2017, although she did play her first two leading roles on television during that time in Homecoming and Gaslit. Roberts is rich, successful, and has proven enough to sit at home until the right script lands on her desk, but she wasn’t in the same position back in the 1990s, when Hollywood was trying to shove her into a box she didn’t want to be in.
The way things have always worked is that if an actor scores either their breakout role, a colossal box office hit, or a combination of both in the same film, the industry’s immediate response is to inundate them with incredibly similar parts in the hopes that lightning will strike at least twice, if not many more times.
Sure enough, after Pretty Woman strapped a rocket to her back, the actor was dubbed ‘America’s Sweetheart’ and started being offered every rom-com under the sun. That wasn’t where she saw her career heading, though, and after a thoroughly miserable experience on the set of Steven Spielberg’s Hook, she took a step back until the perfect role in the perfect picture came along.
Between 1987 and 2004, there was only one year that went by without Roberts playing a major role in at least one feature, although she was still present and accounted for by way of a cameo as herself in Robert Altman’s 1992 satire, The Player. It was the longest self-imposed exile of her professional life up until that point, and the project that drew her back onto the big screen became one of her personal favourites.
Talking to Howard Stern, she named Alan J Pakula’s The Pelican Brief as one of her best, explaining, “I hadn’t worked for a long time because all the scripts I was reading, I didn’t like. And so, it had been about two years, so going back on a movie set after two years, that was fulfilling.”
There were 736 days between the release of Hook and Pakula’s John Grisham adaptation, but with Spielberg’s fantasy commencing shooting in February 1991 and Roberts’ two-hander opposite Denzel Washington reaching in front of the cameras in May 1993, there was an even longer gap between her last days on the former and the latter.
The Pelican Brief underlined that she hadn’t lost any of her sway with audiences during her two-year sabbatical, with the combination of two A-list stars paired together just when the Grisham craze was inching towards the apex of its mainstream popularity propelling the movie to almost $200million at the global box office, hinting that Roberts’ absence had made the audience’s heart grow fonder.
Luckily for her, she bounced back from her horrible time on Hook with a film that took pride of place among her back catalogue.
