Julia Roberts wants to clear up one thing about the making of Eat Pray Love.
Director Ryan Murphy has been telling folks his lead actress put on 10 pounds during production — specifically during the food-heavy Italian leg of their around-the-world trip — but Roberts insists that’s an exaggeration.
“Ryan keeps telling people I put on 10 pounds. It was a little less than that,” she tells Metro. “But I loved every pound. And everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s going to drop right off in India,’ but I didn’t get that memo. That did not happen.”
To properly recreate Liz Gilbert’s journey of self-discovery from her home in New York to Rome, India and Bali, Murphy and Roberts set out to shoot Eat Pray Love in order, something most movies can’t afford to do. “For me, it was a great luxury to shoot it in chronological order,” Roberts says. “It was almost a necessity of emotional evolution. And you can’t start any movie in Bali and then leave.”
The role also proved to be an intense internal journey for Roberts. “This was one of the first situations I’d been in that did call for a lot of emotional availability,” she admits.
The actress, now happily married with three young children, found her own family a comfort during the soul-searching shoot. “It was definitely great to have a fulfilled sense of my own life, and to be playing some of these scenes and come home at the end of the day and say, ‘OK, good. Everybody’s here, we’re good.’”
Not surprisingly, though, the conversation keeps coming back to the food. “There was this one plate of pasta that was actually, all other circumstances removed, delicious pasta — super-simple spaghetti with a little tomato sauce. It was delicious.”
But the culinary memory that stands out the most for Roberts didn’t happen in Rome. “We went to Naples to where she had eaten that pizza and got there at eight in the morning, sat down to shoot and proceeded to start my day with eight entire slices of pizza in 45 minutes,” Roberts says. “So the deliciousness of something wears a tiny bit after piece seven — just because you’re speed-eating. But that scene in particular I sort of relished just wolfing it down. And I would eat an entire slice in a take. I don’t know why I thought that was a great idea.”
