“I’m so crazy about that guy”: the director Julia Roberts was desperate to work with
One of the more surprising faces to pop up during this year’s Comic Relief, the annual televised festival of fun where incredibly rich people give up ten to 20 minutes of their time to implore people without money to give some of it to others of the same, was that of Julia Roberts, who briefly appeared in a Catherine Tate sketch in order to convince viewers it was somehow 2006 again.
Anyway, it was a rare view of Roberts simply because she is very choosy about what she does these days; in fact, she has only appeared in five movies in the last ten years, despite still being America’s most popular actress in terms of those who frequently go to the cinema. Like many big-name actors, though, she has got involved more in television work, including winning a Golden Globe nomination for Homecoming, a psychological thriller that ran for two seasons on Prime Video in 2018.
A year prior to that, she had something of a renaissance thanks to the Owen Wilson weepy Wonder about a ten-year-old boy with a facial disfigurement who gets bullied, which I absolutely will not watch because it’s too upsetting. Nevertheless, plenty of people did, and from a budget of just $20million, it made £315m globally, with many describing Roberts’ performance as one of the best of her 30-year career up to that point.
For a few years after the success of her critically panned but commercially successful 2010 drama Eat Pray Love, she had struggled for a hit before she signed on to a fantasy comedy that reimagined Snow White and co-starred everyone’s favourite flesh-chomper, Armie Hammer. Despite not being made by Disney, it had many of the hallmarks of the original, like an evil queen, played by Roberts, and dwarfs of varying descriptions, and it was not a cheap movie to make, with a budget of around $100m.
It was directed by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, an Indian director who made his mark with the cult Jennifer Lopez horror The Cell in 2000 and in 2011 had made another fantasy film, this time with Henry Cavill, called Immortals, which had been a reasonable hit.
That was enough to convince Roberts to sign up for his film the following year, as she told film writer Drew Turney, “It was just Tarsem. I’m so crazy about that guy, there’s no two ways about it. He’s so remarkable, and his point of view is so original and massive. I really just wanted to have lunch with him. I didn’t really care what we were going to talk about, you know, and then he spins his web and there’s no getting out of it.”
One imagines that her paycheck of circa $20m, or close to a quarter of the film’s entire budget, also had something to do with it, but regardless, the film performed fairly well once released, making around $80m in profit despite some underwhelming reviews and going up against The Hunger Games in cinemas.
Singh ended up only directing one more film following Mirror Mirror’s release, the 2015 sci-fi Self/Less starring Ryan Reynolds, which ended up being something of a flop. Roberts meanwhile moved on to 2013’s August: Osage County, a comedy co-starring Meryl Streep that earned both lead actors Academy Award nominations.
She will be seen next year in a thriller called Panic Carefully with Elizabeth Olsen, and possibly before that in Ocean’s 14, which is set to bring back big guns, including Brad Pitt and George Clooney, where she last appeared alongside them in the franchise in 2004’s Ocean’s 12.
