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Julia Roberts has said she has made the choice not to do nude scenes throughout her 35-year film career.
“You know, not criticising others’ choices, but for me to not take off my clothes in a movie or be vulnerable in physical ways is a choice that I guess I make for myself,” she said.
The actress, interviewed by Notting Hill writer and director Richard Curtis for British Vogue, also said she nearly didn’t take the film’s starring role.
“Honestly, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was your movie, playing a movie actress,” she told him.
“I was so uncomfortable! I mean, we’ve talked about this so many times, but I almost didn’t take the part because it just seemed – oh, it just seemed so awkward. I didn’t even know how to play that person.”
The star was also asked if she chose roles that represented her views on feminism.
“It would be more to the point that the things I choose not to do are representative of me,” she replied.
She added: “But in effect, I’m choosing not to do something as opposed to choosing to do something.”
Roberts said she’d had a “G-rated career” – referring to the US film rating for movies suitable for a general audience.
She had a body double for revealing scenes as a prostitute in 1990’s Pretty Woman, and has previously spoken about asking for an explicit sex scene in 2009’s Duplicity to be changed.
“It’s not really what I do, so if you’re going to ask me to do it, you have to expect it to be toned down. You know, as a mum of three, I feel like that,” she was reported to have said at the time.
She also once said: “I wouldn’t do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary.”
‘I speak plainly’
During the new Vogue interview, Curtis said there was a “tough side” to Roberts.
“I think I speak very plainly,” the Oscar winner responded. “That’s kind of how I see myself. I’m very forthright.
“There are a lot of personalities in the world that don’t accept that easily, and it can seem really harsh, even if I feel like I’m just being honest about something and just saying, ‘This is how I see it’. I never am trying to be unkind.”
She recalled that she “loathed” a costume that had been chosen for her to wear in a key scene in Notting Hill, so decided to send her driver back to her flat to fetch her own clothes for her to wear instead.
“It was my own flip-flops and my cute little blue velvet skirt and a T-shirt and my cardigan.”
Roberts also said young film stars have a more “exhausting” and “chaotic” time now compared with the late 1980s and early 90s, when she made her name.
“I don’t know if it’s better [today], because it’s not my experience, but it just seems very different,” she said. “And in a way, it seems so cluttered. There are so many elements to being famous now, it just seems exhausting.
“Whereas I feel like, and again this is just my perception, because I don’t really know – I’m not a young person starting out in show business in the 21st Century – but it seems to me that it was: you meet people, you read for parts, you try to get jobs, you get a job, you try to do a good job, and from that job, you might meet some new people who might suggest you to some other people and then you might get another job and you might get paid a little bit more for that job, and it might be a little bit of a better job.
“It kind of just made this sort of structural sense, and now it just seems more chaotic. There’s more elements, there’s more noise, there’s more outlets, there’s more stuff.”
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