Julia Roberts was interviewed for a Vogue U.K. fashion spread by her “Notting Hill” director Richard Curtis, who asked the Oscar winner if she feels “responsibility to other women” when choosing her movie roles as an A-list star for well over three decades.
“Do you ever think, ‘I’m representing something?'” Curtis asked Roberts.
“I think it would be more to the point that the things I choose not to do are representative of me,” Roberts answered, noting that “my G-rated career” is an example.
“You know, not to be criticizing others’ choices, but for me to not take off my clothes in a movie or be vulnerable in physical ways is a choice that I guess I make for myself,” Roberts said about how she’s chosen to represent herself. “But in effect, I’m choosing not to do something as opposed to choosing to do something.”
While Roberts has starred in sexually charged films such as Mike Nichols’ “Closer,” she has never gone nude on screen before. She told Vogue U.K. it’s been a deliberate choice.
Curtis also asked Roberts to weigh in on rising stars and whether it’s easier or more difficult to be a star nowadays than when she exploded onto the scene in the 1990s.
“Oh, it’s completely different from my time,” Roberts said. “I mean, that’s when I really feel like a dinosaur, when you just look at the structure of the business. It’s completely different.”
“I don’t know if it’s better, because it’s not my experience, but it just seems very different. And in a way, it seems so cluttered,” she continued. “There are so many elements to being famous now, it just seems exhausting. Whereas I feel like, and again this is just my perception, because I don’t really know – I’m not a young person starting out in show business in the 21st century – but it seems to me that it was: you meet people, you read for parts, you try to get jobs, you get a job, you try to do a good job, and from that job, you might meet some new people who might suggest you to some other people and then you might get another job and you might get paid a little bit more for that job, and it might be a little bit of a better job. It kind of just made this sort of structural sense, and now it just seems more chaotic. There’s more elements, there’s more noise, there’s more outlets, there’s more stuff.”
Roberts recently starred opposite Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali in the Netflix original movie “Leave the World Behind,” which became a smash hit for the streamer in December.
