20 Questions: Julia Roberts

The fastest transformation in recent Hollywood history changed Julia Roberts into Julia Roberts. At 24, she is the hottest female property in all filmdom. Her performances in films such as "Satisfaction," "Mystic Pizza," "Steel Magnolias," "Pretty Woman" and "Flatliners" made audiences forget that she was Eric Roberts' little sister. Since we talked with her, she has worked on "Sleeping with the Enemy," "Dying Young" and the upcoming "Hook." Also, since then, a forest of trees has been sacrificed to the intricacies--real and imagined--of her love life. We were immediately impressed when we met her. She was funny, earnest and blunt. She also had bushels of hair and, of course, those lips and eyes that seem to be the first things other writers describe about her. We also discovered, for reasons that are not entirely clear, that she peels the crusts off her hamburger buns.

1.

[Q] Playboy:What are the advantages and the limitations of a drawl?

[A] Roberts:It got me out of a traffic ticket once. I'd made an illegal left turn. I have a Georgia driver's license, so I said I'd been in Los Angeles for only nine days. The policewoman let me go because I did a real Southern number: [sugary sweet] "I'm here visiting my boyfriend and I'm lost and I'm late and I don't know what to do." The only drawback was when I first got to New York. Everyone would say, "Where are you from?" but I couldn't hear my accent. It was maddening. So I went to a speech class and said, "Cat. Dog. I'm going to the restaurant." In the movies, Southern accents are the most abused of all time.

There's such a variety, but people think if they go kinda country and sound like a hick that they've got it. Steel Magnolias is a perfect example. Just with the six main characters, there are three accents. Dolly Parton and Daryl Hannah have a lower-class rural sound, and Sally Field and I are upper middle class--it's a bit more rhythmic. Shirley MacLaine and Olympia Dukakis have the flowy, Vivian Leigh plantation accent.

2.

[Q] Playboy:How seriously do you take movie reviews when it's obvious that the reviewer is infatuated with you?

[A] Roberts:If you take the good reviews seriously, then you have to take the bad reviews seriously. I'm not usually aware of someone's feelings toward me, but I do remember one reviewer who described me as "pillowy-lipped." I don't know why he put so much thought into it, but it did seem like something you had to look for.

3.

[Q] Playboy:Kim Basinger was the mouth of the Eighties; you've been touted by some fans as the lips of the Nineties. Do they ever get in the way? Have you ever hated your mouth? What's it like to put on your lipstick?

[A] Roberts: "Lips of the Nineties," babe. Gotta be something. [Laughs] They've never gotten in the way. When they're your own lips, you don't really think about them. But there was a time in high school when I felt a little grief because I had an unusual mouth, unlike the other girls who had perfect mouths with little heart-top lips. But I never have done anything to accentuate my mouth. It's crooked and I have a couple of little scars. I never wear lipstick. In fact, I'm really bad at putting it on. Every time I've put it on, I've taken it off before I went out.

4.

[Q] Playboy:We've seen you with blonde, red and black hair. What does only your hairdresser know for sure?

[A] Roberts:My real hair color is kind of a dark blonde. Now I just have mood hair.

5.

[Q] Playboy:Do different hair colors impart different kinds of mental states?

[A] Roberts:Red hair gets a lot of attention. It's supposed to be this flaming, passionate thing. It makes me giddy.

6.

[Q] Playboy:Does it make any sense to take your own shampoo to a hotel?

[A] Roberts:Oh, no. I love hotel shampoo. One time, a girlfriend said, "Julia, I want my hair to be like yours. Your hair is so great. What kind of shampoo do you use?" I said, "Hotel shampoo." She said, "Oh? What hotel?"

7.

[Q] Playboy:You gained weight to play Daisy in Mystic Pizza. What philosophic insights did you come away with about being robust in a thin-is-in world?

[A] Roberts:Daisy was a voluptuous throwback to the days when the peak of sexy was to have the curves and the moves. I decided it would be kind of interesting if well executed. But at the time, I was flipping out. A big reason was that on page two of the script, it read, "Daisy Araujo, twenty-two, the kind of girl men would kill for." I would walk around the set and the crew would kid me. They'd say, "There's that girl men are going to kill for today." Now, how the fuck can you live up to that?

8.

[Q] Playboy:Good question. Want to answer it?

[A] Roberts:Can I tell you something funny about sex? I came to this grand revelation recently when a whole bunch of girlfriends and I were in the car. I said, "You can live without sex, you just can. You absolutely can sustain life without sex." And there was this real quiet in the car for about half a minute, and then my girlfriend says, "Yeah, you can, but why would you want to?"

Sexual tension is everywhere. I feel it and I support it. I don't partake of it all the time. If I had a meeting with ten men for a movie that I really wanted, the last thing I would think about is, do they find me attractive? I'm too busy trying to convince these people of the points I'm there trying to make. That's why I don't get that kind of stuff that you hear happens to actresses. You get what you give out, and maybe seven times out of ten, if that situation comes up, it's because somebody was giving off a funky energy that somebody else was picking up on and that person decided to seize the (continued on page 156)Julia Roberts(continued from page 151) moment. I don't ever put that out there unless it's a normal situation of trying to woo some guy.

9.

[Q] Playboy:Is it true that for actors, it doesn't count on location?

[A] Roberts:I disagree with that. I've always thought of location as an island and all you have is one another. So a lot of bonding goes on. But these things aren't always short term. I can say that, obviously, because I've done it. [Irate] We've all read the papers and know what I've done and haven't done. It's bizarre to deal with reports in the press about my romantic life. Why the fuck would anybody care? And when they completely fabricate something, it really blows your mind. I have seen years of my life summed up in five sentences. It sounds like it all took place over the course of a wild weekend. I've read flat-out lies so hideous they made me cry. But I stopped because I wasn't going to let those people get to me. [Pauses] I've seen so many actors--including myself--who've been tortured by having gone out with somebody they've worked with. And it doesn't matter if you go out with them for two years; people still call it a location romance. Give me a fucking break. Who am I going to go out with? I don't work at a pet store. So I dated someone I worked with. That was probably somebody I spent twenty hours a day with on a set for three months out of my life. Who am I going to know better? A person I had time to go out with twice in those three months? A complete relationship can last a week if you walk away with something that you don't forget, or something that moved you, or something that altered you. Ultimately, it just makes interesting lunch conversation on Mondays for people who are too eager to get the attention at the table. They want to be able to put in their two cents, so they come up with an interesting story. "Well, I just met Julia Roberts last week." "Really?" They get seven minutes of glory--and I get hurt.

10.

[Q] Playboy:What are you still a fool for?

[A] Roberts:In a setting with the right individual, I'm a fool for just about anything. I'm also totally gullible. If I'm told something, I'll believe it until it's proved otherwise. I would like to think that you can just do that: believe people.

11.

[Q] Playboy:How did you prepare to play a prostitute in Pretty Woman?

[A] Roberts:I met a lot of prostitutes. They have wonderful hopes for the future. [Pauses] They weren't nice immediately. A couple came on kind of strong and tough at first. But once I sprang for lunch and took them to Del Taco, they seemed to be nice and talkative. I met enough to get a sense that a hooker is not what Joe Shmo imagines one to be. She could be the girl you're sitting next to on the bus.

12.

[Q] Playboy:Your character, Vivian, dressed engagingly. Were you comfortable wearing an eight-inch leather skirt on Hollywood Boulevard?

[A] Roberts:[Laughs] I took so much shit for that outfit. I know how to deal with any kind of attention that somebody's going to give to Julia Roberts. But the attention that Julia got as Vivian, standing on Hollywood Boulevard in that outfit, was not the kind of attention that I am used to or prepared to deal with. At one point, there were so many catcalls directed at me that I went back to my trailer and felt hideous. I just wanted to hide. Vivian's clothes were a thousand times more provocative than anything I'd have in my closet. I'm just not used to that kind of attention. Vivian would say, "Fuck you! Blow it out your ass!" to anyone who barked at her. I turn red and get hives.

13.

[Q] Playboy:Describe your first love scene.

[A] Roberts:I was so scared and nervous I felt like I was twelve years old and had never been kissed. I was pacing in my trailer. I thought I was going to throw up. Then I called my mom, and then I did throw up; and then I called my mom again. But it went very smoothly.

14.

[Q] Playboy:Is there any scene in any of your films that you'd like to take back?

[A] Roberts:There's only one scene I was embarrassed about that I was supposedly in. But I had the day off, so it was actually kind of funny. In Satisfaction, when I'm supposedly in the van with my boyfriend, the van is rocking. A grand amount of time passes by, as if we've been going at it for quite long. Actually, it was an empty van and there were a couple of grips behind it pushing it back and forth. I was at the beach all day. [Laughs]

15.

[Q] Playboy:As a Georgia-to-New-York-to-Los-Angeles transplant, what had you heard about Hollywood that wasn't true?

[A] Roberts:I heard, "Your agent is never your friend." It's a complete and total fucking piece-of-shit lie. I also heard that all producers are scum bags. Also untrue of the producers I've worked with. So everybody was wrong. But my brother told me something that was true: "You have to remember that this is show business, not show friendship."

16.

[Q] Playboy:Rate Andrew Dice Clay's imitation of your brother.

[A] Roberts:I saw it just once. It wasn't an imitation of Eric, though; it was an imitation of a character he did in The Pope of Greenwich Village, Paulie. Because I was expecting an imitation of Eric, it came and went so fast. It was very funny, but everybody imitates Paulie.

17.

[Q] Playboy:Tell us your favorite bedtime story.

[A] Roberts:A friend told me a story about Henry VIII. His sixth wife didn't want to die. Because he did not have a good track record, she decided to do something to secure her life. So every night, she told him half a story and she wouldn't tell him the other half until the next morning. When I heard this, I thought it was wonderful. My friend said, "So what do you think?" But instead of telling him, I said, "Once upon a time," and walked out.

18.

[Q] Playboy:If someone were to break into your house, what wouldn't you want messed around with?

[A] Roberts:I wouldn't want anyone to take any of my letters or pictures; anything that I had written. Things that I can't replace. They'll just fall into the hands of people who won't understand and who don't give a shit. They'll probably end up being thrown away. For instance, I have a letter from my daddy, the only letter that I managed not to lose as a child, that he wrote to me on July 6, 1977. If anybody ever took that away from me, I would just be destroyed. It doesn't mean anything to anybody else, yet I can read that letter ten times a day and it moves me in a different way every time.

19.

[Q] Playboy:What's the most annoying clichè about actresses?

[A] Roberts:That they are temperamental and have to be coddled and have to have their egos stroked. I guess you have to treat some people as if they were fragile. But speaking for myself, I don't need to be treated that way. I don't need to be treated badly; I don't need to be abused for the sake of a performance, because I'll find my performance. But I don't have to have people tiptoeing around me, either, trying not to hurt my feelings. If my performance is bad, the best thing you can do is tell me, and not in a cruel way, "That's not good."

20.

[Q] Playboy:What should an actress always try to avoid?

[A] Roberts:I'm always interested in the way people speak and what they speak about. Do they talk about politics, for instance? I never do, because I feel like it puts something between me and an audience. Like with Jane Fonda--and I'm mentioning her only because her picture is right on the wall in front of me--you can't help but watch her in a movie and at some point it will occur to you that she's either a workout queen or Hanoi Jane. Something's going to come into your head that will obstruct complete believability in what she's doing right then. So I try not to do that. It's hard enough to go to the movies and watch somebody, especially when you're in a lot of movies and more and more people know that you are Jessica Lange, that you are Sally Field. Anything that you can do to help the public get lost in a movie, the better oft you are.