Julia Roberts: 'I Had No Business Being in a Movie Like That'

Julia Roberts explains how 'Pretty Woman' evolved
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 15, 2019 9:30 AM CDT
Julia Roberts: 'I Had No Business Being in a Movie Like That'
Actress Julia Roberts addresses the audience during the 47th AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony honoring actor Denzel Washington at the Dolby Theatre, Thursday, June 6, 2019, in Los Angeles.   (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

"I had no business being in a movie like that." So says Julia Roberts about the original Pretty Woman—then titled 3000—a film that apparently went from dark-and-art to Hollywood rom-com before anyone yelled "action!" Roberts tells the story in a Variety Actors on Actors interview with Patricia Arquette, who herself auditioned for the original part. The 3000 project "was really dark and the ending was really heavy," says Arquette. "It really read like a dark gritty art movie." Roberts recalls reading in the 3000 script that someone threw her character from a car, "threw the money on top of her, as memory serves, and just drove away leaving her in some dirty alley." Roberts got the part but seemed to lose it when the project went to Disney.

"And I went, went to Disney?" she says. "Are they gonna animate it? How does this become a Disney movie?" New director Garry Marshall still met with Roberts "because he's a great human being" and "felt it would only be fair to meet me, since I had this job for three days and lost it." And we all know how that turned out. "I couldn't do it then, I couldn't do it now," says Roberts of the original version. "Thank god it fell apart." Roberts also touches on whether her salaries broke a glass ceiling, saying "it never felt like pressure" and she considered the big bucks "ridiculous, but I'll be part of this party," per People. She also shrugs off the notion of being "America's sweetheart": "I am very unemotional about stuff like that," she says, per Today. "I don't feel that I have to live up to something." (More Hollywood stories.)

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