Lip Shtick Julia Roberts Stays True To Her Southern Roots, And Her Distinct Features

Julia Roberts’s smile is a little too wide, her lips a little too full, her laugh a little too loud. But then movie stars become movie stars by exaggerating their traits, not underplaying, n’est-ce pas?

As she once described brother-sister talk between older sibling Eric Roberts and herself, “We’re big and loud and crazed.” Yet at 29 she’s also grown wary, pragmatic, savvy about self-protection.

Still, she’s very much the movie star this summer. On Friday, the pretty woman will play a mischievous woman, sabotaging a marriage in the screwball comedy “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” Next month, she’ll be seen as a Justice Department lawyer checking out taxi driver Mel Gibson’s paranoid rant in the thriller “Conspiracy Theory.”

Actually, Roberts’ laugh is a wonderful thing, a throaty contralto whoop that her films ought to employ more often. Besides, it’s like star sonar: telling you exactly which room she’s in when you’re walking down a hotel corridor to chat with her.

All morning she’s been doing TV interviews, replying to questions about her hair. No, her copper-colored Louise Brooks helmet of bobbed hair isn’t her natural look. Left to itself, believe it or not, her hair is the rich, thick auburn cascade seen in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” Much to the relief of theater owners, it looks very much as it did in “Pretty Woman.”

Mouth, lips, hair. The things that sometimes (but never for long) yank the camera away from Roberts’s most interesting feature, her eyes. Deep, dark, fiery, they’re the key to her appeal, keeping you in constant touch with what she’s feeling. Much of the time she looks easily spooked, poised for flight, gripped by dread. Not in this new film. But often enough to make you wonder if she doesn’t harbor deep ambivalence about the perhaps inevitable focus on her looks.

Roberts is a Southern woman from Smyrna, Ga., she’ll remind you, still hooked on biscuits and gravy. Also hooked on extroverted, gregarious friendliness. In a roomful of radio interviewers, she heartily addresses many as “honey,” sounding not at all self-conscious.

But that’s on the outside. There’s a part of Roberts that she keeps to herself, rebuffing in a ladylike way any probing into her personal life. She’d have reason enough to feel gun-shy after inordinate tabloid attention in the wake of a broken romance with Kiefer Sutherland and a broken marriage to Lyle Lovett.

Ask her who she trusts these days and she quickly answers, with something like relief, “My sister!” She’s referring to her middle sister, Lisa, with whom she stayed when she came to New York to break into acting. (At that time, she sold running shoes in which she would speed to auditions.) Now they have apartments one floor apart, she says, with Roberts dividing her time between New York and L.A.

Fending off paparazzi

It would take a brave man to date her, she told Billy Bob Thornton in Interview magazine. “What I meant by that,” she explains now, “is that, say, some unsuspecting man comes to my door to take me to dinner, who just wants to converse with me over food. By the time we’re done with the salad, if there’s not a pack of hungry paparazzi outside the restaurant, someone is frantically at a Powerbook, writing about how, you know, we are going to get married in Barbados in a week. And I don’t even know this guy’s middle name.

“So it’s taxing and it’s difficult, especially if it’s not someone who is in this business. It takes a brave man to rise to that occasion. I could ask men out. But I’m a Southern woman. So that’s really kind of improper.

“But I’m getting a little more breathing room from the media. I think I’ve established myself as a rather normal, settled, sturdy individual who doesn’t go for the kind of scene they like to put me in. They probably moved on to the next poor sod.

“I can’t tell you, though, how many times on a set, whether it be two weeks into it or the day of wrap, I have people come up and say, ‘I thought you were the biggest bitch and, wow, you’re really nice,’ and I say, ‘Thanks.’ I don’t overcompensate, because I’m not going to beg someone to like me. Take it or leave it, it’s all up to you. But anybody who has had anything particularly nasty to say about me, I’d lay odds they’ve never met me.

“And I think there’s something about the sanctity of one’s personal life and family life that shouldn’t be reduced to mere words. That’s kind of sacred ground and I am pretty clammed about that. I think I learned from my mistakes. I was raised to be a really open and trusting person. Being Southern, I’m rather talkative. And people would come in and they were very friendly and forthright and they seemed very interested in your life and ‘how are you?’ and ‘what’s happening?’ and ‘who’s your boyfriend?’ and ‘how do you feel?’ And you’d find yourself engaging in simple conversation. But at this point I respect the fact that there are certain places that belong to me.

“You know, I’ve sort of grown up on film a little bit. When I started in this business, I was a teenager, and I think the insecurities of a 19-year-old are pretty primal and natural and necessary. But I’ve grown up. I feel more like an adult now. I have a higher regard for myself and don’t need to be quite so hard on myself.

“I’m like the same geeky girl I always was, really. I wear nicer clothes, better shoes, or no shoes at all - but pretty much the same person. I think there’s an evolution where you become smarter and you learn more and know more. But as the core person that I am, I am the same.”

Playing the bad guy

Of “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” she says, “It was fun to play a comedic role, fun to play a devious woman who goes into the scheme mode. Suddenly she decides she wants the guy when he’s about to marry someone else, and looks all over the place for anything she can possibly get her hands on to create a wedge. I mean, I have a mischievous side, but this is not something I can relate to too heavily. My mischievous side is not too devious.

“But just because you’re the lead actor doesn’t mean you can’t be bad - a bad person, not a bad actor. When someone asked me what this role was about, and I said ‘art imitating life,’ it was a joke, but nobody laughed. So let’s make it clear that I’m not living this devious, sneaky life. You have to laugh with me, because if I don’t have feedback, I’ll just go down the toilet!

“You know, it’s easiest to watch someone being silly and wacky and to laugh at that. … But when you watch a more dramatic movie, it’s more of an effort. ‘Mary Reilly’ (Roberts’s failed Jekyll-Hyde film) is a hard movie to watch. For me, it was intense and scary. You get all tensed up.”

It’s a stretch, Julia Roberts as the bad guy, even clothed in goofiness, as she is in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” In describing her character as a restaurant critic who forms a judgment after taking only a few bites, she makes wry fun of herself.

Although she clearly has grown, is more poised, and is bolstered by the confidence implicit in knowing that enough people want to see her on the screen to raise her fee to $12 million-plus per film, Roberts knows she’s still got some growing to do, including artistically. Candidly, she says that patience and understanding are areas in which she needs work. One good sign is that she’s taking a hand in assessing her scripts - she reads 10 a week when she isn’t shooting or yielding to inertia.

She had input on the shaping of the script for “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” she says. The director, Australia’s P.J. Hogan, demonstrated a gift for making marriage comically chaotic in “Muriel’s Wedding.” He says Roberts insisted on building up the parts played by Cameron Diaz (as the incipient bride Roberts’s character is trying to undermine) and by Rupert Everett (who supplies wit and conscience as Roberts’s editor and buddy).

Also, Roberts had anti-input, meaning, she explains almost gleefully, she doesn’t sing a note. “I was relieved not to have any singing duties in this movie. Singing is not my forte. And having done it for Woody Allen and then again in ‘Michael Collins,’ I was pretty much musically spent in the cinema.”

Dramatically, though, Roberts seems hardly spent at all. In virtually mint condition, one might say. Fewer gleaming smiles, more earthy humor, less seductiveness, more trust in her eyes, and it could just be that her best work lies ahead of her.