Julia Roberts has finally broken her three-decade silence on Hugh Grant, and what she has revealed about their time together on Notting Hill is far more complicated than the fairy tale the world has carried since 1999.
The actress, now 57, has begun speaking with a candor she rarely permits herself about the period that produced one of the most beloved romantic comedies ever made, and about the co-star whose conduct toward her behind the scenes stood in stark contrast to the effortless chemistry that lit up the screen.
For twenty-five years, Roberts said nothing. Not a word about the jokes Grant made at her expense on set, not a word about the remarks he gave to interviewers during the film’s press tour, not a word about the friction that those who worked on the production understood was present but that the public never suspected.
Now, in the accumulation of interviews and appearances that have marked her recent years, the shape of what actually happened has started to emerge, and it tells a story about fame, vulnerability, and the strange distance between the person the world constructs and the person who has to live inside that construction.
Notting Hill was released in May 1999 and made nearly 364 million dollars at the global box office, becoming the highest-grossing British film of that year. It was, by every measurable standard, a triumph. But the triumph on screen was built on something considerably more fraught behind it.
Grant arrived on set as the king of British romantic comedy, having been made an international star by Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994. His stammering charm and self-deprecating wit were exactly what the role of Will Thacker required. What the production did not fully anticipate was his manner toward his co-star.
He made jokes about the size of Roberts’s mouth openly and repeatedly on set. He later told an interviewer, 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 on his great scale of snogging, Renee Zellweger was better.
Roberts did not respond publicly to any of it for a quarter of a century. She is, by her own account and by the account of everyone who has worked with her, too careful for a single revelation, too private in the way that people who have had their privacy stripped away learn to be.
Grant also said something to Vanity Fair during the film’s press tour that laid bare the dynamic on set. It is very easy, he said, when you are dealing with a very reasonable, lovely, relaxed 30-year-old woman, to forget that that is also the Julia Roberts who for 10 years beforehand you could never have gotten within 100 yards of.
It was a freakish moment, he continued, 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 Grant 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 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 the money and the fame and the fifteen million dollars 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 twenty-two 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 ten million dollars to fifteen million dollars, and Grant found this irritating. He was not impressed, by various accounts. The two 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.
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. They quoted it at weddings. They used it in arguments.
They whispered it to themselves in moments of ordinary human vulnerability.
Grant has since joked, in the particularly dry self-flagellating 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 Notting Hill, she made Erin Brockovich, the role that had been waiting for her since before she knew it existed. A real woman, 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 twenty million dollars 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 Moder, whom she had met on the set of The Mexican in 2000.
They married in 2002. They have three children, twins 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, 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 candor 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 Notting 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 Roberts has finally said, after thirty 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 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.
Roberts was born Julia Fiona Roberts on October 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia, the youngest of three children in a family built around the idea of making things. Her parents, Walter and Betty, were both actors and playwrights who met while performing in theatrical productions for the United States Armed Forces.
They married in 1955 and went on to co-found the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop. They ran a children’s acting school in Decatur, Georgia, while Betty was pregnant with Julia. Martin Luther King Jr.’
s children attended that school.
When Julia was born, Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill as a gesture of gratitude for what the Roberts family had done, running the only racially integrated theater troupe 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, when Julia was four. 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 forty-three 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.
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 does not.
What tipped it was Steel Magnolias in 1989. She had already appeared in Mystic Pizza the previous year and made people pay attention. The casting director for Steel Magnolias had insisted the filmmakers see her.
She walked into the room, and the film’s writer, Robert Harling, 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 Pfeiffer, Molly Ringwald, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, 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 three hundred thousand dollars. The film made four hundred sixty-three million dollars worldwide. It became the highest ticket-selling romantic comedy in American box office history, and Julia Roberts, twenty-two 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 Kiefer Sutherland 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 Lyle Lovett in 1993, which lasted twenty-one 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 Reilly, in which she played a maid for a Dr. Jekyll 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 three hundred million dollars worldwide.
And then two years later came Notting 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.
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 Michell, 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.
And here is the question worth sitting with, the one that Roberts’s long silence and her recent honesty together seem to pose. 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?
The film belongs to the people who watched it. That is what she has said. And perhaps that is the final word on a story that has taken thirty years to tell, from a woman who learned early that things end, and who has spent the decades since deciding, carefully and privately, which things are worth keeping.
