A barefoot
Julia Roberts has thrown open a hotel room’s French doors and is leaning out of the window, hollering down at an oblivious gardener as he deafeningly blows leaves away from the hotel’s grounds.
She tries again. “EXCUSE ME!” It’s not working, but Roberts does not give up. She resorts to birdcalls.The man removes his earplugs.
“Hi! Would you mind just turning that off for a few minutes? We’re just recording something in here.” Roberts offers up that dazzling grin of hers. “Thank you! Thanks so much!”
Roberts collapses back onto a couch next to Lily Collins and curls up, a slim gold toe ring on her right foot matching a gold pedicure. On screen, the two star in the live-action film “Mirror Mirror,” director Tarsem Singh’s comedy-laced retelling of the classic Snow White tale.
This time, Roberts plays a deranged, self-absorbed evil queen starving her kingdom in pursuit of a handsome, rich prince (Armie Hammer), while her stepdaughter, Collins’ fresh-faced Snow White, remains forever chained to the castle (to be aided later by a band of testy dwarves).
Taking on her manipulative queen, who throws lavish parties, plays chess with live people as pawns and tortures Snow, required a suspension of disbelief, Roberts says.
“Since it is kind of this fairy-tale land, there aren’t any rules of logic or the real-world compass doesn’t come into it, so you can, in a way, do anything,” she says.
And she delighted in a famous cohort. “Once we brought Nathan Lane in as my right-hand man, that gave me a lot more liberty to take it to a place of just madness, to make her sort of crazy and mad and obsessed and driven and never leaves the castle,” says Roberts, 44, whose character is fighting to keep her kingdom from the doe-like Snow. “So I think she’s gone kind of crazy, 18 years of obsessing over this person. Tarsem just let us run wild and come up with crazy things.”
Roberts and her husband, Danny Moder, typically split time between New Mexico, California and New York, and after winning her Oscar for “Erin Brockovich” in 2000, she has chosen to live more quietly with their three children, twins Hazel and Phinnaeus, 7, and Henry, 4.
“She has very strict boundaries about what is her life and what is her public life,” says Ryan Murphy, who was nervous before directing her on his second film, “Eat, Pray, Love,” but found her warm, funny and unpretentious. “She’s a very sort of old-fashioned movie star in that way, in that she has mystery to her.”
Says Roberts, “My husband and I conduct ourselves as the people that we are, not as the jobs that we have, and I think that has translated into our expansion into being a family and how we’re raising our kids. I’m sure I’m having the same conversations with my kids in the evening that half the moms in the country are: ‘Why don’t we have a video game player in our house? Well, because . . .’ ” She smiles. “So it’s the same stuff.”
But remarkably, you rarely see pictures of Roberts coming out of a grocery store.
She nods and pauses. “I’m just grateful that we have been allowed to have a family life that doesn’t get too aggressively pursued. I don’t know what the trick is to it, but I have a lot of gratitude for it because I feel like it’s really allowed our family to progress in a very natural, easy way in our community and in our home life.”
In the past decade, Roberts’ films have been a mixed bag. She has had hits from “Charlie Wilson’s War” to the “Ocean’s” franchise, but misses, too, like “Mona Lisa Smile” and last year’s “Larry Crowne,” which earned just a 35 percent rating on the Rotten Tomatoes site and had a weak take at the box office.
“I’d say she’s batting about .500,” says Keith Simanton, IMDB.com’s managing editor, who likens some of her recent films to a stagnant period she experienced in the ’90s. But with a fun turn in “Mirror Mirror,” and the upcoming “August: Osage County” (which won a Tony on Broadway), in which she plays Meryl Streep’s daughter, “that’s her going back to quality.”
Roberts says she hasn’t changed her criteria for picking roles.
“I’ve never been one to work very frequently. I’ve probably worked once a year for the last 10 or 12 years. The things that draw me are the same instinctual things — I can remove the element of needing to pay rent, but besides that, the equation is pretty much the same as when I was 20 to now.”
She uses her greenlight power sparingly. “In the past year, she’s said yes to Meryl Streep and she’s said yes to me,” says Murphy, who will reteam with Roberts on the drama “The Normal Heart,” which co-stars Mark Ruffalo and shoots this fall.
He calls it a tough, emotional role. “She plays a doctor in the early ’80s who is sort of the only person to realize that this newfound thing called AIDS is really going to take a toll in the world.”
After “Mirror Mirror,” around the corner waits “Snow White and the Huntsman” (out June 1), a darker version of the tale with Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen and Kristen Stewart as Snow White. A strange coincidence?
“It is not strange!” Roberts says. “Movies are like the ark: They come out in twos. They always have. Capote movies, ‘Freaky Friday’ movies, there’s always two.” And the difference, she says, is obvious. “The short answer is, in their movie, the Huntsman is played by Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and in our movie, the Huntsman is played by Nathan Lane.”
So what’s a magical day like for these two outside the spotlight?
Collins laughs: “Something that doesn’t involve a schedule.”
“I had one yesterday,” Roberts says. “And they’re indescribable. And the best parts are not printable.”
They rise to leave, and Roberts pops out the window to thank the gardener. Collins whispers: “He’s probably still sitting out there going: ‘No, it wasn’t, no it wasn’t her.’ ”
