According to Julia Stiles, Julia Roberts is more than just a superb actor; she is also a confidante and mother figure.
The 44-year-old actress from 10 Things I Hate About You appeared on the May 20 edition of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day and admitted that she used to battle with body image. During this period, Stiles said that Roberts boosted her confidence as they starred in 2003’s Mona Lisa Smile.
“She was a wonderful example for us, and she was so maternal with all the young women on that set,” Stiles told me. “She had a lot of experience being a woman, especially one whose looks were so scrutinized.”
She went on, “[Roberts] said to us, ‘You’re going to look back on these photos of you in your 20s and be like, I was beautiful — why didn’t I see that?” And she’s absolutely right!”
Stiles previously praised Roberts’ on-set manner while filming Mona Lisa Smile during a January interview on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.
“She took care of all the girls on that set, in a way she didn’t really [have to],” she recalled of Roberts, 57. “The movie hinged on [Roberts]—she’s a huge star; everything was riding on her performance in this movie, and yet she took the time to be really kind and generous to all the young women who were in it.”
In Mona Lisa Smile, Roberts plays Katherine Ann Watson, who accepts an art history teaching post at Wellesley College in the 1950s and hopes to enlighten her youthful pupils, including Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, and Ginnifer Goodwin.
Stiles also acknowledged on the podcast that she has suffered from restricted eating in the past, blaming Hollywood pressures for her body troubles.
“I’m not talking about an eating disorder; it was just restrictive, scheduled, and unpleasant. I was constantly concerned that it would be beyond my control. So, what if I gain weight?” she asked Day. “I couldn’t help but have a disordered relationship with it all.”
“There was stress over what your body looks like and trying to mold it into a certain size,” she told me. “As actresses, we promote on the red carpet and must wear sample sizes from fashion designers. So it’s always, “Are we going to fit into the sample size?”
Ultimately, her role as a mother to her and her husband Preston Cook’s three children, Strummer, Arlo, and Henry, taught Stiles that obsessing over her physical appearance was “a waste of time.”
“I’ve moved on,” she explained. “I’ve learned to be nicer in the way I think about and look at my body—to be kinder to myself while yet trusting my body… After having a five-month-old kid, I would be exhausted, with little sleep. I didn’t have an opportunity to consider if I’d be able to get back in shape enough to fit into those sample sizes.