Tag Archives: Hugh Hefner

At a private home in the Napa wine country that’s, for one day, been converted into a makeshift production facility and press area for “Eat Pray Love,” Julia Roberts sits in a shaded room overlooking the fields with a look of beatific calm that’s only slightly out-of-place with the hustle happening all around.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” may be a beloved book, but playing Gilbert is Roberts’ biggest on-screen role since 2000′s “Erin Brockovich.” Did she worry about taking such a large part for the first time in a long time? “I took a lot of deliberating to come to a decision, because it was such a big workload,” she says. “When I did ‘Erin Brockovich,’ I packed my little bag and drove to Barstow. That was an easy decision to make. This was a decision that we had to make as a family, and all of us really be committed to and invested in, because it was a long shoot, there was a lot of traveling and I worked every day.”

And, it should be noted, worked with Ryan Murphy, a director with only one other feature film to his name. To Roberts, that seemed appropriate. “I thought, well, it’s a leap of faith, which is really what a lot of the movie’s about, and I just had to put all my trust in Ryan and say, ‘Well, let’s go and see what happens.’ And I just got really lucky that he stayed true to who I thought he was in the beginning up to the very last moment. I’m just so in awe of what he did as his second movie. Are you kidding? As his 20th movie it would still be an accomplishment.”

Roberts also had to play two sides of the same character — not just Gilbert’s observational, dry, detached voice as a writer, but the slightly more immediate reality of the confusion and chaos of Gilbert’s actual life. Was that an appealing part of the role? “Utterly appealing,” she says. “Anytime you can play messy or crazy, it’s just fun as an actor. But she’s so smart, and she does have a very great, clear description and depiction of things, so it was nice to be the voice of that side of her.”

Finally, ask Roberts about the best meal she enjoyed during the whole globe-spanning production, and her answer’s as carefully thought-out as it is culinary: “I don’t know — everybody’s so taken with the spaghetti that I ate in the movie. It was really delicious, so I should probably — since we are promoting the film — stick with that bowl of pasta.”

–From my article at The Rundown