Julia Roberts Discusses Gap In Rom-Coms, George Clooney, And Kids

Julia Roberts is set to return to the silver screen after a four-year hiatus.

She’ll co-star alongside good friend (and frequent co-star) George Clooney in Universal Pictures’ Ticket to Paradise, scheduled for an October 21 release date.

“People sometimes misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by that I haven’t done a romantic comedy as my not wanting to do one,” she told New York Times Magazine. “If I had read something that I thought was that Notting Hill level of writing or My Best Friend’s Wedding level of madcap fun, I would do it. They didn’t exist until this movie that I just did that Ol Parker [writer/director of Mama Mia! Here We Go Again] wrote and directed.”

Roberts says her marriage to cinematographer Danny Molder in 2002 and the three teenagers they share are her top priority. Not filmmaking. And she’s very selective with movie projects.

“Here’s the thing: If I’d thought something was good enough, I would have done it. But I also had three kids in the last 18 years,” Roberts said. “That raises the bar even more because then it’s not only, Is this material good? It’s also the math equation of my husband’s work schedule and the kids’ school schedule and summer vacation. It’s not just, Oh, I think I want to do this. I have a sense of great pride in being home with my family and considering myself a homemaker. For so much of my children’s younger life they would see their dad go off and I would work a little, but they almost didn’t notice. It was like I was only gone when they were napping or something. But as they get older, and particularly with my daughter, I do have a sense of responsibility for showing my children that I can be creative and that it’s meaningful to me — so meaningful that for periods of time I will choose to focus on that almost more than my family, which has been hard for me to come to terms with.”

Roberts said she almost passed on the 2013 movie August: Osage County, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar, because she didn’t want to leave her family. But her husband encouraged her.

She was part of an all-star cast that included Meryl Streep, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale and more. Clooney was a producer of the film.

“He was right to push me,” Roberts said of her husband. “Because if he said, ‘I don’t know,’ I would have been like: ‘I don’t either! I’m not going!’ That’s the female plight. That feeling of leaving is hard.”