Julia Roberts: “I am without fear”
The Oscar winning actress on power, parenting and surviving Hollywood’s boys’ club
Julia Roberts has been Hollywood royalty for so long it’s easy to forget how rare her kind of longevity is. In her latest interview with The Times, the 57-year-old Oscar winner reflects on her long career, the messy legacy of #MeToo and the challenges of raising teenagers in an age of social media overload.
Her new film, After the Hunt - directed by Luca Guadagnino - places Roberts at the centre of a sexual-assault scandal on a university campus. Alma, her character, is caught between supporting a male colleague accused of assault and the student who makes the claim.
When asked if she related to a line in the film about having to succeed in a ‘deeply misogynist’ world - reflecting her own experience in Hollywood’s more male-dominated past - Roberts didn’t hesitate.
“Well, it’s still super-male!... Make no mistake.” She told The Times.
“But yes. Any woman in any job not populated in the majority by women can say Alma’s speech. We’ve all had that experience. Any woman has. Because I often find myself sitting at a table and, maybe, there’s only one other woman there.”
And how does she handle it?
“In those sort of environments” she explains “I am without fear.”
The line lands with the confidence of someone who has been challenging the industry for decades.
Her Oscar-winning turn in Erin Brockovich remains a blueprint for complex female power: a woman who doesn’t shrink from confrontation, but meets it with humanity and humour. Not to mention that Roberts earnt a $20 million fee for the role - an “unprecedented amount for an actress at the time.”
Her reflections on power and confidence aren’t limited to Hollywood; they also inform how she approaches parenting.
In The Times interview, she recalls sitting in a parents’ meeting where everyone was sharing their complaints about modern teens (too much screen time, too much attitude) until one woman stood up and changed the energy in the room.
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“All the parents were sharing their troubles… Then this incredible mum, so cool and beautiful, stands up and goes, ‘I fucking love teenagers. I fucking love them! They are the raddest creatures on the planet!’ And she’s right - it reminds you how much we miss in life when we think we know more, or better, about everything.”
But she’s also realistic about the world her children are growing up in. The social media age, she says, has rewired our brains - and not for the better:
“Our brains are incapable of that influx,” she warns. “Our eyeballs, brains, all that is too much, especially for little, sweet, soft mushy brains that need to be filled instead with mud and fields.”
Read the full interview on the Times website
The anti-woke movie. Very timely🤦♂️