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Julia Roberts Reveals the Reason She’s Refused to Do Nude Scenes Throughout Her Iconic Career
After more than three decades of being a Hollywood superstar, Julia Roberts has never gone topless or nude in any of her films and now she’s revealing why she refused to strip down during her career.
“You know, not to be criticizing 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,” Julia, 56, told British Vogue in her cover debut which dropped on Thursday, January 11.
The Oscar winner even joked about “My G-rated career,” as not only has she never gone nude, she rarely does sex scenes.
Julia got her big break playing sex worker Vivian Ward in 1990’s Pretty Woman. Despite the nature of her character, she had no racy scenes with Richard Gere‘s business tycoon Edward Lewis. Vivian initially wore a sexy outfit when she first met Edward on Hollywood Boulevard but gained a stunning and much more conservative wardrobe when she agreed to play his girlfriend for a week in exchange for $3,000.
Her 2000 film Erin Brockovich showed Julia in her most skin-baring role to date, wearing padded bras and tiny miniskirts, but that was because the real environmental activist dressed that way. However, Julia didn’t want her clothing to define the part.
”When you take someone who — by my modest, conservative standards of dressing — is so visually provocative, you don’t want to make it seem like a movie contrivance. ‘Oh, we hired someone with really long legs, so let’s give her the shortest skirts known to mankind.’ You want it to seem as much a part of her as her hair or voice or anything else,” she told Entertainment Weekly upon the film’s release.
Erin herself didn’t think the wardrobe department went far enough. ”When Erin saw the movie, the only thing that was inaccurate is that the skirts weren’t short enough,” director Steven Soderbergh told the publication.
The Georgia native even has an aversion to doing scenes wearing swimwear. “Listen, there’s a reason why you don’t see me naked me in movies, you don’t see me running around in bathing suits in movies: It’s just not my thing,” she told The Observer in 2007.
After Julia and husband Danny Moder welcomed twins Hazel and Phinneas in 2004, her stance on stripping down for movies became ever stronger. “I wouldn’t do nudity in a film. To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary,” she told OK! in 2007.
When it came to a sex scene with Clive Owen in 2012’s Duplicity, even that was made more conservative. “You know it’s not really what I do, so if you are going ask me to do it, you have to expect it to be toned down. You know, as a mom of three, I feel like that,” she explained to the U.K’s The Standard.
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