Julia Roberts First Time Breaks Silence About Hugh Grant After Three Decades
I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her. >> One line, 1999, and an entire generation felt something shift inside them. Julia Roberts delivered it in Nodding Hill. The most famous woman in the world playing a woman who just wanted to be ordinary. People quoted it at weddings, whispered it to themselves in the dark.
It became shorthand for the most frightening thing a person can say out loud. The world assumed the two people on screen were as effortlessly connected off camera as they appeared to be on it. They were not. And what Hugh Grant actually said about Julia Roberts and what she never answered for 30 years is a story nobody has told in full until now.
At 57 years old, Julia Roberts has finally begun to say what she actually thinks about that period. Not in a single revelation. She is too careful for that. too private in the way that people who have had their privacy stripped away learn to be. but in the accumulation of interviews, appearances, and the particular honesty that comes to people when they have been around long enough to stop managing their image quite so carefully.
The real shape of the story has started to emerge. And it begins, as most real stories do, a long time before anyone ever heard of Notting Hill. Julia Fiona Roberts was born on October 28th, 1967 in Smyrna, Georgia. The youngest of three children in a family that was in almost every meaningful way built around the idea of making things.
Her parents, Walter and Betty, were both actors and playwrights who had met while performing in theatrical productions for the United States Armed Forces. married in 1955 and gone on to co-found the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop. They ran a children’s acting school in Decar, Georgia, while Betty was pregnant with Julia. Martin Luther King Jr.
‘s children attended that school. When Julia was born, Kretta Scott King paid the hospital bill as a gesture of gratitude for what the Roberts family had done, running the only racially integrated theater troop in the region during one of the most charged periods in American history. That is the world Julia Roberts came into, a world where art and decency were not separate categories.
Her parents divorced in 1971. Julia was 4 years old. She moved with her mother and sister to Smyrna while her father and brother Eric stayed in Atlanta. In 1977, when Julia was nine, her father died of throat cancer. He was 43 years old. She has spoken about it across different interviews over the years, always carefully, always with the particular weight of someone who learned too early that things end.
He died when I was really young. She has said, “You just carry them with you.” The ferocious private life she protected even as her public life became one of the most scrutinized in the world. She graduated from Campbell High School in Smyrna in 1985 and moved to New York City. Following her brother Eric, who had already found work as an actor, she had no formal training and no particular plan.
She signed with a modeling agency and got no jobs. She started attending acting classes. She was not at that point someone who seemed destined for anything in particular. She was a girl from Georgia with a spectacular smile and the particular combination of charm and hunger that sometimes adds up to a career and sometimes doesn’t.
What tipped it was Steel Magnolia’s in 1989. She had already appeared in Mystic Pizza the previous year and made people pay attention. The casting director for Steel Magnolia’s had insisted the filmmakers see her. She walked into the room and the film’s writer, Robert Haring, later described it. She walked in and that smile lit everything up and I said, “That’s my sister.
” She got the part. Director Herbert Ross was notoriously difficult on her throughout the shoot, going after her, as Sally Field would later say, with a vengeance. It was one of her first major productions, and Ross made sure she felt it. She held. The film was a critical and commercial success and Roberts received her first Academy Award nomination, her first Golden Globe win and the particular kind of attention that arrives when the industry suddenly decides it has been overlooking you.
The following year came Pretty Woman. Six actresses turned the role down before it reached her. Michelle Fefeifer, Molly Ringwald, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Lee, Karen Allen, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts walked in and made it hers so completely that it is now impossible to imagine any of those other names in it.
She was paid $300,000. The film made $463 million worldwide. It became the highest ticket selling romantic comedy in American box office history and Julia Roberts 22 years old became the most famous woman in the world more or less overnight. Fame at that speed at that age is not simply a gift. She would spend the next decade learning exactly what it costs.
There was the broken engagement to Kefir Southerntherland in 1991. Called off three days before the ceremony in front of a world that had decided it had opinions about her choices. There was the brief, startling marriage to country singer Lyall Love it in 1993, which lasted 21 months and ended with the particular exhaustion of two people who had tried something real in the full glare of something public.
There were the years when the roles were either enormous hits or quiet misses, and the space between the two was entirely visible to anyone who read a magazine. Hook, sleeping with the enemy, The Pelican Brief, I Love Trouble, Mary Riley, in which she played a maid for a Dr.
Jackal figure and took deliberate unglamorous risks that the audience was not ready for. She was doing something complicated in those years, trying to be both the thing the world had decided she was and the thing she actually wanted to be. And those two things did not always occupy the same space. The smile that everybody recognized was real, but it was also armor.
And what was underneath it was a person who had been made famous faster than any normal process of becoming could prepare you for. Who had lost her father at nine. Who had watched her parents’ marriage fail. And who was trying to navigate love and work and personhood inside a machine that had decided all three belonged to the public.
My best friend’s wedding in 1997 brought her back to the top of the box office in a way that felt like a recalibration. She played the wrong woman. The one who realizes too late the one who loses and she played it with a generosity that the role required and that not every actress would have been willing to bring to it. The film made nearly $300 million worldwide.
And then two years later came Nodding Hill. The script had been written by Richard Curtis who had already given the world four weddings and a funeral and who understood something precise about a particular kind of love story. The one that should be impossible but keeps happening anyway. The premise was almost absurd in its simplicity.
The most famous woman in the world walks into a small travel bookshop in London and falls in love with the man behind the counter. The most famous woman in the world was transparently Julia Roberts. The man behind the counter was Hugh Grant. Julia Roberts has said in interviews since that she did not come to the project with high expectations.
When I sat to read it, she said, “I did not have any great expectations. It was a job, a good script, a good director in Roger Mitchell, a good part.” What she did not anticipate was the particular tension that would develop between herself and her co-star and how that tension would change the texture of the film that came out of it.
Hugh Grant arrived on set as the king of British romantic comedy. Four Weddings and a Funeral had made him an international star in 1994. and his particular gift, the stammering charm, the self-deprecating wit, the ability to be both ridiculous and irresistible in the same breath, was exactly what the role of Will Faker required.
What Grant also brought, and what the production did not fully anticipate, was a manner toward his co-star that fell somewhere between ambivalent and actively difficult. He made jokes about the size of Julia Robert’s mouth openly on set repeatedly. He told an interviewer later, apparently without registering how it would land, that she was very big mouthed, literally physically a very big mouth.
He went on to say that in his great scale of snogging, Renee Zelwigger was better. Julia Roberts did not respond publicly to any of this for 25 years. Grant also said something to Vanity Fair during the film’s press tour in 1999 that tells you everything about the dynamic on set. It’s very easy when you’re dealing with a very reasonable, lovely, relaxed 30-year-old woman, he said, to forget that that’s also the Julia Roberts who for 10 years beforehand you could never have gotten within 100 yards of.
It was a freakish moment when we realized that the woman we were dealing with was actually both those things. this relaxed person and this untouchable iconic object of which there are so many photographs. What he was describing beneath the surface diplomacy was the disorientation of being in close daily proximity to someone whose image had been so thoroughly constructed by the world that the actual person became [clears throat] difficult to locate inside it.
Roberts, for her part, was navigating something genuinely strange. She was playing a version of herself, a famous actress who cannot go anywhere without being photographed, who has not been touched by normal life in a decade, who carries the weight of public recognition like a suit she cannot remove. The film required her to be simultaneously iconic and vulnerable to make the audience believe that Anna Scott, despite everything, despite the money and the fame and the $15 million per picture, was still capable of needing something as ordinary as love. She
pulled it off. The line, “I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her,” landed because Roberts meant it. Not as Anna Scott, as herself. As the woman who had been famous since she was 22 and had spent the decades since, learning how much the fame and the person inside it had to be kept in separate rooms.
Behind the scenes, Roberts reportedly negotiated her salary upward during production from $10 million to $15 million, and Grant found this irritating. He was not impressed by various accounts. The two of them maintained a professional courtesy that did not warm into anything resembling the friendship their characters shared on screen.
And yet when the cameras rolled, something happened that neither of them could entirely manufacture or explain. The chemistry that Richard Curtis had written into the script, the tentative, interrupted, repeatedly thwarted romance between a movie star and a bookshop owner somehow found its way onto the screen despite the friction behind it.
Nodding Hill opened in May of 1999 and made almost $364 million at the global box office. It became the highest grossing British film of that year. It was by every measurable standard a triumph. and what audiences took away from it more than the box office numbers or the awards or the soundtrack with Elvis Costello’s she threading through it like a theme was that one line, I’m also just a girl.
They quoted it at weddings. They used it in arguments. They whispered it to themselves in moments of ordinary human vulnerability when the words they actually needed were not coming and someone else’s words would have to do. Grant has since joked in the particularly dry self- flagagillating way that is his defense mechanism of choice that he would like to make a sequel in which Will and Anna go through a hideous divorce.
Roberts has never commented on this publicly. She has said about the film that it holds a special place for her, not for the reasons the world assumes, but because of what it asked of her and what she found out in the asking that she was capable of. The year after Nodding Hill, she made Aaron Brochovich.
It was the role that had been waiting for her since before she knew it existed. A real woman, Aaron Brochovich, a struggling single mother with no legal training, who helped bring one of the largest class action lawsuits in American history against a California power company that had poisoned a small town’s water supply.
Roberts was paid $20 million for it, the first actress in Hollywood history to reach that salary for a single film. She won the Academy Award for best actress. She also won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild Award, and approximately every other significant piece of recognition the industry had to offer. She accepted the Oscar in a green Valentino dress with her hair loose and her smile at full power and gave a speech that was warm and funny and entirely in control.
And then she went home to the life she was building with cinematographer Daniel Motor whom she had met on the set of The Mexican in 2000. They married in 2002. They have three children, twins [clears throat] Hazel and Phineas born in 2004 and Henry born in 2007. She has described her marriage and her family as the thing that finally gave shape to everything else.
the foundation under the fame, the private life that the public version of Julia Roberts had always been reaching toward. She lives in New Mexico. She goes barefoot when she can, which is often a habit so characteristic that it has been incorporated into multiple film roles over the years. She is, by most available evidence, someone who has found what they were looking for.
Hugh Grant in the same years followed a different trajectory. He married Swedish actress Anna Eberstein in 2018 after a long period of confirmed and rumored relationships that he discussed with a cander that sometimes startled interviewers. He has spoken in recent years with genuine warmth about fatherhood and what it changed in him.
His career has moved with age into more interesting territory. The warm likability of his earlier work giving way to something sharper and more complicated in films like Paddington 2 and Dungeons and Dragons and his performance in the HBO series The Undoing in which he played a man concealing something truly dark behind a surface of easy charm.
When Nicole Kidman, who appeared opposite him in The Undoing, brought up Nodding Hill, she mentioned that she had always wanted to play the Julia Roberts role. Grant received that information with the particular expression of a man filing it away for future use in a dinner party conversation. What Julia Roberts has finally said after 30 years of declining to engage with the question of what really happened between her and Hugh Grant on that set amounts to something that does not fit neatly into either the positive or negative categories the
world tends to prefer. She has said that the experience was complex, that making a film about a woman who cannot be seen as ordinary while being treated as anything but ordinary by her co-star had a kind of irony to it that she understood only later. That the line, “I’m also just a girl,” was the truest thing in the whole script.
and that she knew it was true because she had spent the previous decade trying to make other people believe it while not quite being able to believe it herself. She has said that she and Hugh Grant are fine, that they have run into each other at things and been perfectly pleasant as two people are, who made something together that the world loved and have no particular need to perform the friendship that the world assumes accompanied it.
And she has said in the careful way she tends to say the things that are most true that the film belongs to the people who watched it, not to her, not to Grant, not to Richard Curtis, to the person who watched it on a Tuesday night and felt something shift. To the woman who quoted it at her wedding. To everyone who ever needed a way to say the simplest and most frightening thing that they were just a person standing in front of another person asking [clears throat] to be loved and found that the words had already been written for them. That is
what Notting Hill gave the world. That is what Julia Roberts gave Notting Hill. and the relationship between the two people at the center of it. Complicated, professionally strained, privately resolved into something between ordinary civility and genuine mutual respect turns out to be in its own way its own kind of love story.
Not the one that was filmed, the real one, which is always messier and more interesting than anything that makes it onto a screen. And here is the question worth sitting with. Is it possible that the most honest performances come from people who are working through something real even when nobody on set knows exactly what it is? Tell us what you think.
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