Why was Julia Roberts fired from ‘Pretty Woman’?
There are a lot of reasons to raise your eyebrows at Pretty Woman. The trope about the hooker with a heart of gold just waiting around for a knight in shining armour (or businessman in designer suits) to scoop her up off the streets and save her is a tired and problematic one. The movie makes no attempt to deal with the enormous imbalance of power between Julia Roberts as a young sex worker and Richard Gere as a disgustingly wealthy executive, nor does it make any effort to accurately depict the machinations of sex work.
Released in 1990, Gary Marshall’s film is a classic rom-com that blithely ignores each and every red flag it so brazenly plants in the soil. Though it would make perfect sense for the movie-watching public to disown it for being woefully outdated, people mostly haven’t for one specific reason: Julia Roberts. She was just 23 years old when the film was released and had only appeared in a handful of films, including Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias.
However, she sparkled so brightly in Pretty Woman that she completely eclipsed Gere, an established 41-year-old leading man. Her charisma carries the movie and doesn’t just atone for its problematic plot but shrinks it down to insignificance. When you’re watching the movie, you’re watching the birth of a movie star in real-time, and even more than three decades later, it’s thrilling to see.
It is impossible to imagine anyone else in the role of Vivian Ward, which is why it’s so shocking that Roberts was fired from the film just before shooting got underway. Pretty Woman had initially been a much darker script that revolved around the seediness of the storyline rather than completely ignoring it. It had originally been titled 3000, the amount of money that Edward paid Vivian for her services. She was supposed to be addicted to drugs, and their transaction was supposed to end with him pushing her out of his car, throwing the cash on her, and driving away.
It was this version of the story that Roberts signed on to, but when Marshall stepped in, and the project moved to a new studio, the producers decided that she just couldn’t handle a sweet romantic comedy. “I was cast in 3000 before it went to Gary,” Roberts remembered in 2015. “And then, over a happy weekend of having a job, it was sold to Disney, and I was out of a job.”
One of the producers suggested to Marshall that he consider her anyway, so he brought her in even though he “didn’t know her from Adam”. When she arrived at his office at the tender age of 21, he explained the predicament. “I don’t know what to do with you,” she remembered him saying. “Some people say you can’t dress ‘er up; some people say you can’t dress ‘er down – what do you do?”
For several nail-biting weeks, Roberts had no idea whether she was going to win back the part again. Disney was looking for alternatives, and she had to come in for multiple screen tests before they finally came to their senses and realised that she was the only person who could play the role. If they hadn’t, it’s reasonable to assume that it would be all but forgotten today.
