Julia Roberts sits down with Oprah Winfrey for a candid chat in the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
Dishing on everything from her fear of heights to her 50th birthday, the “Ben Is Back” star tells Winfrey her three kids — Hazel, Phinnaeus and Henry — only sort-of know exactly how famous she really is.
“I think I told you once when they were starting to figure it out, it was like, ‘You’re famous?’ And I said, ‘I think a lot of people might have seen the movie that I’m in or might know who I am.’ Maybe an hour goes by. ‘Are you more famous than Taylor Swift?'”
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Like Swift, who got political for the first time this week, Roberts is using her platform to speak out against the current U.S. political administration.
“When Donald Trump was elected, my daughter, Hazel, came down and the TV was on, and it said on the crawl at the bottom, Trump wins, and she kind of gasped because, of course, we all had this collective hope that something else was going to happen. And what I saw in that exact moment was the complete need for me as a parent to find a way to make her feel that she could still have a voice,” she says, explaining her decision to attend the first Women’s March in Washington.
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“I wanted her to feel like she still had a place in the world, that she could still believe in what she believed in, even though someone else was now president,” Roberts tells Winfrey. “It was very powerful for me to have her in a way be my leader into this space of marching and participating in being a citizen of this country.”
Winfrey also asks Roberts about why she decided to join Instagram (she posted for the first time in June).
“Well, a few things,” she responds. “I think one of the things, obviously my kids were asking about it. ‘Why don’t you do that? That’d be cool.’ … It’s definitely a balancing act, and it’s been tricky figuring out what to post because I am private, but I am also friendly… Although something did happen recently on my niece Emma [Roberts]’s Instagram that I think taught me a lot about what it’s like being a young person in today’s society. One weekend morning Emma slept over, and we got up and were having tea and playing cards and having this beautiful morning, and then a couple of days later she posted a picture of us.”
Adds Roberts: “And the number of people who felt absolutely required to talk about how terrible I looked in the picture — that I’m not aging well, that I look like a man, why would she even post a picture like this when I look that terrible! And I was amazed at how that made me feel. I’m a 50-year-old woman and I know who I am, and still my feelings got hurt. I was sad that people couldn’t see the point of it, the sweetness of it, the absolute shining joy of that photo. I thought, ‘What if I was 15?'”
The interview between the two superstars will also be available on Winfrey’s podcast, “Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations” beginning October 23.
