Why has Julia Roberts waited 20 years to star in another romcom?

Julia Roberts is starring in Ticket to Paradise later this year with George Clooney – it’s her first romcom in 20 years. Why has she waited so long to reappear in the genre that made her one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars?

Is it true there haven’t been any scripts that live up to her expectations, as she claimed last week, in The New York Times? “Here’s the thing: if I’d thought something was good enough, I would have done it,” she said.

Roberts and Clooney play a divorced couple in Ticket to Paradise, who go to Bali to stop their lovestruck daughter – Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever – from repeating the same mistake they think they made 25 years earlier.

The film, which is out later this year, is directed and co-written by Ol Parker, who wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and directed Mama Mia! Here We Go Again.

It will certainly be nostalgic for me; I grew up on Roberts’s romcoms. Who can forget her as Vivian, the sex worker in Pretty Woman (1990), lying in a bubble bath in a glitzy hotel suite, belting out Prince’s “Kiss”, while her wealthy client, played by Richard Gere, asks to hire her for another week.

Their chemistry is sizzling. “I would have stayed for 2,000,” she tells him. “I would have paid you four,” he says.

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Or as the food critic Jules Potter in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), who realises she's in love with her best friend Michael, just before his wedding to Kimmy, played by Cameron Diaz. “I realise this comes at a very inopportune time but I really have this gigantic favour to ask of you. Choose me. Marry me. Let me make you happy,” she says, in an attempt to win him back.

Then, of course, Notting Hill (1999), as Anna Scott, the big American movie star, and Hugh Grant as the bumbling Brit Will Thacker, the owner of a travel bookshop in Notting Hill, who fall in love. He doesn’t want to get hurt and feels out of her league.

“The fame thing isn’t really real of course. And don’t forget I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her,” says Anna with that earnestness that always makes her so relatable.

America’s Sweethearts (2001) was her last major role in a traditional romcom, playing the devoted personal assistant Kiki Harrison, who ends up in a divorce-love triangle with the former husband-and-wife movie stars Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Eddie Thomas (John Cusack), who have made hit films together but are in the middle of a dramatic break-up.

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Then, after two decades, Hollywood’s romcom queen is back. I’m left wondering, why now? What really brought Roberts out of romcom retirement? What was so irresistible about this proposal that she just couldn’t turn it down? How did it all happen?

The 54-year-old actor told The New York Times that people sometimes “misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by” as her “not wanting” to do a romantic comedy. But, she revealed, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“If I had read something that I thought was Notting Hill level of writing or My Best Friend’s Wedding level of madcap fun, I would do it,” she said. “They didn’t exist until this movie that I just did [Ticket to Paradise] that Ol Parker wrote and directed.”

She added: “But even with that, I thought, well, disaster, because this only works if it’s George Clooney. Lo and behold, George felt it only worked with me. Somehow we were both able to do it, and off we went,” she said.

It all sounds dreamy. But it’s never as simple as that.

Ticket to Paradise producer Tim Bevan, who also produced the Richard Curtis penned romcoms Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), and Love Actually (2003) with his company Working Title, says “the stars aligned” for this new Roberts/Clooney film.

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“I think what happened was that we got lucky on this one. Ol Parker, most importantly, wrote it with Julia and George in mind… so it’s written quite specifically for them, imagining that they might have been in a similar movie together, like 25 years ago, and this would be a sequel to it,” says Bevan about the new romcom.

“Nothing is easy in what we do. It’s difficult to write something that they will both respond to. It’s difficult to get both of them to read it. Then both of them to agree to do it. And then it's really difficult to marry up everyone’s dates and times to make it all happen with big movie stars like that.”

He adds: “But after a couple of bumps, Julia and George agreed to do it.”

It’s Roberts and Clooney’s fifth film together – in Oceans Eleven (2001) and Ocean’s Twelve (2004) she played Tess Ocean, the law-abiding wife of Clooney’s conman Danny Ocean. The pair last shared the screen in 2016’s Money Monster.

“We’re having the time of our lives,” Clooney recently said about filming Ticket to Paradise with Roberts, a film he described as having an “old school” feel to it.

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“In the back of their minds, I think they probably both thought that maybe they would make one more of these sorts of movies. And we were lucky enough to have the screenplay that they both responded to,” says Bevan.

Parker and his producing partner Sarah Harvey brought the project to Working Title. “We’ve worked with big actors and stand a chance of helping them get big actors to do the film”, says Bevan, “but also because it’s a sort of kickback film to the sorts of films Working Title was making in the Nineties and Noughties.”

He says a good script is “about getting the right mixture between funny – and making sure there are some other characters in the film who are funny – and pathos”.

“Nostalgia is a pretty good ingredient too. And I think there’s a fair element to this movie too, because when you watch it, you’ll bring Julia in Pretty Woman or Notting Hill to it and you’ll bring George and Out of Sight or Oceans.”

Have there really been no scripts that match the ones of the 1990s like Notting Hill? Is there some kind of drought?

Bevan says there are plenty of romcoms being made as “it’s good fodder for the streamers” – but that it was more of a case for Roberts that “the right one hasn’t crossed her path”.

“It’s quite brave to do a romcom as an old rocker. So, it’s got to be right on the money,” he says.

“These people are not where they are by just doing anything. They are rightly, extremely choosy about the material that they choose to commit to.”

He says it’s true that the quality of the writing is “a really difficult thing”.

“And there are not many people in the world who can really nail it. Obviously, Richard Curtis is one – and Parker is another. And it’s not something that the bigger writers tend to do.”

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He adds: “We know what a story in a romcom is – so it’s all about being able to write a character in a brilliant way. And that’s what Ol did. And then I think particularly Julia, I’m sure she could see herself in the role because it was written for her, and George could see himself in the role because it was written for him. As George said, “I don’t know what you would have done if we didn’t agree to do it.”

Bevan says that in scripts, they are looking “for characters that we believe in” and for it to be “genuinely emotional”.

“You’re never 100 per cent sure that emotion is going to work,” says Bevan, who watches a lot of them in post-production. “If you feel a little lump in your throat towards the end of it, or at some point in a very early cut, you know that you’re probably OK, basically, because that’s something that you can build on – and certainly there’s a certain emotional quality to this movie.”

Could this signal the return of the romcom? With Marvel and other superhero films dominating the global box office, genres like romcoms can get pushed aside. But there are a new batch of romcoms in 2022: are any of them any good?

Jennifer Lopez in Marry Me with Owen Wilson plays a pop superstar who proposes to a random guy after her fiance cheats on her. It was a total flop earlier this year. Lopez is also in Shotgun Wedding later in 2022 with Josh Duhamel. They play a couple getting married who find out their entire wedding party has been highjacked by a criminal gang.

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The upcoming Bros, about two gay men with commitment issues, looks more hopeful. It’s the first mainstream Hollywood romcom with an entirely LGBT+ cast, starring Billy Eichner, who also wrote the script. While Amazon Prime’s I Want You Back – referred to as “a pleasantly run-of-the-mill romcom” in one review – follows best friends Peter and Emma who try to destroy their exs’ new relationships – but end up falling for each other in the process.

The Lost City starring Sandra Bullock as Loretta Sage, a depressed best-selling romance novelist and Channing Tatum as Alan Caprison, a cover model, is currently reinvigorating the adventure romcom genre. While Netflix He’s Expecting, a Japanese comedy drama, which premiered on 21 April, depicts a man who becomes pregnant.

We’ve had some memorable ones in the past too – not just Bridget Jones’s Diary starring Renee Zellweger. Crazy Stupid Love in 2011, starred Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, and of course, nothing beats writer Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (1989). Woody Allen’s New York romcom Annie Hall (1977), stars Diane Keaton in an Oscar-winning performance.

Roberts and Clooney are certainly romcom pedigree and while Ticket to Paradise might not end up a classic like Notting Hill –it still has an important purpose.

“I think there’s got to be a return of films that make you feel good right now,” says Bevan.

“The world’s pretty shit at the moment. It’s not surprising that people will respond to a film like this [Ticket to Paradise]. It’s a warm blanket.”

Ticket to Paradise is out 16 September .