From Times Online May 29, 2010

Emma Roberts: what aunt Julia taught me
After a troubled childhood, Julia Roberts’s niece found tween stardom. But now is the time to start getting serious
Kevin Maher Recommend? Emma Roberts is not a fan of nudity. Not her own, anyway. “I would show my back and my butt on camera, but I would never go topless,” says the 19-year-old actress, tween icon and Hollywood heiress (her aunt is Julia Roberts, her father Eric Roberts). “Going topless is so tasteless, and I prefer to leave all that stuff to people’s imagination,” she pronounces wisely, from a secluded restaurant booth in an even more secluded West End hotel. She is kohl-eyed, with dirty blonde and bedraggled hair, and sports a gold Marc Jacobs safety-pin earring, a graffiti-style sleeveless Tibi top and the mock dishevelled mien of a “sk8ter-girl” supermodel. She is tiny. Kylie tiny. And though she has the frame of a sparrow, she has the handshake of a builder.

“But you never know what might happen,” she continues, offering a sudden rethink on screen nakedness. “This is what I’m saying now, but in five years’ time it could be totally different.”

This is the archetypal Emma Roberts moment. To say that she is in transition is an understatement. Thanks to an early back-story in kids’ TV and more recent film hits such as Hotel for Dogs and Nancy Drew, the actress commands legions of screaming pre-adolescent fans and shares cover space on girlie fanzines with dreamy pin-ups such as Zac Efron, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. And yet, she says, as she moves towards her twenties, she is inevitably “veering towards older things”. Thus, off-screen, she struggles with her squeaky Disney-clean image and with the pressure to maintain the integrity of, well, her brand. She drinks wine while in London, but is worried about how it will be reported back home. “You feel very adult, sitting in London with a glass of wine, but because you’re not allowed to do it in LA, it is seen as bad.” Similarly, she was photographed recently with a cigarette hanging from her lips, which caused much hysteria among US moral guardians and fansites alike — “Celebrities smoking is always bad,” read one online commentary, “but it’s especially disappointing when the celebrity is a teenager. And even worse when that teenager is Emma Roberts: there are a lot of girls out there who look up to her.” Roberts sighs. “It’s just kind of tough that I’m not allotted any room to make mistakes. I smoke occasionally. But because it’s me, it’s like, ‘Oh my God! You’re a terrible influence’.”

Equally, on screen, Roberts is quietly tearing up the rulebook on what is expected of an actress who is used to smiling a lot and chewing clunker lines, such as this one from Hotel for Dogs: “We’re going to be in more trouble than we’ve ever been in, but we’re going to save the dogs!”

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4.3.2.1
In the space of two new movies she has redefined her persona entirely for an audience that, hitherto, might have been unaware of her existence. In 4.3.2.1, a blokey UK crime caper movie from the hyperactive mind of Noel Clarke (Adulthood), she stars as one of four feisty female protagonists in a film that includes a fractured narrative, a diamond heist macguffin and enough leering lesbian sex scenes, crotch shots, drug-taking and gun play to satisfy the most jaded male viewer. “I think it’ll play well to some of my, er, older teen audience,” she says, hopefully.

Lymelife, on the other hand, is equally adult in subject matter, but for all the right reasons. It charts the painful disintegration of two neighbouring families in the stultifying world of early-Eighties Long Island. Alec Baldwin and Cynthia Nixon effortlessly lead the peripheral adult cast, while Roberts and Rory Culkin (younger brother of Macaulay) take centre stage as protagonists Adrianna and Scott, two friends on the cusp of a faltering romance. Elsewhere, the movie is haunted by the shadows of Eighties “greed is good” capitalism, the Falklands conflict and a localised Lyme’s disease epidemic that has turned Adrianna’s father, Charlie (Timothy Hutton, mesmerising), into a wreck. Yet it is undeniably the strength of Roberts and Culkin on screen, and their bristling deadpan performances, that hold the film together. Roberts, as the coquettish Adrianna, is the revelation here. She can leap from screwball to droll to quietly hysterical in a single scene. She relishes, it seems, bashing out show-stopping lines such as, “My mother’s a big, fat, slutty f***ing whore!” But Nancy Drew aficionados will be sorely tested by the sight of her first screen sex scene.

“Actually, in the script, it doesn’t even go that far,” she says of a sequence that is nonetheless tastefully shot from above the waist. “But on the day, Derick [Martini, the writer-director] just said, ‘You guys go as far as you want to, and you can basically call cut!’ So me and Rory made everyone get out, and talked, and figured out how far we’d be comfortable taking it. But the way it was edited made it look like we were really, like really, doing it. Watching it with my mom and best friend was mortifying.”

Roberts, here, is at pains to add that, as in life, she is not “trying” to be provocative. “It’s not like I’m going from Hotel for Dogs straight into playing a stripper or a drug addict,” she says. Instead, she adds, she’s simply trying to have a career. She points to actresses such as Anne Hathaway and Gwyneth Paltrow as role models. And, naturally, while she’s on the subject, the conversation inevitably leads back to the woman she politely describes as, “my Aunt Julia”. It’s difficult terrain for Roberts. She has tried to avoid it in the past, partially because she could be accused of riding the coat-tails of her aunt’s success, but also because this subject winds itself backwards into real-life family history. The stuff that rarely makes it into teen magazines.

Her father, Eric, for instance, was a renowned hellraiser when he was arrested for cocaine possession in 1987. He split from his long-term girlfriend and Emma Roberts’s mother, Kelly Cunningham, before Roberts was a year old, and lost custody of her. He would later be arrested, in 1995, for pushing his wife, Eliza Garrett, against a wall, and would become a media whipping boy and appear as an emblem of washed-up celebrity in everything from South Park to Seinfeld. Emma, meanwhile, was raised alone by her mother, and by a strong cross-familial matriarchy that included, remarkably, Eric’s own sisters, Lisa and Julia (Eric would later confess that a longstanding feud with sister Julia, now over, was born out of this ostensible betrayal). Emma’s first experiences of the movie business would be as a six-year-old child, on set with Aunt Julia “and thinking that it was really cool to be away from home and staying in a hotel”.

When I start to mention her father, Roberts cuts me off. “I don’t really read any of the stuff that’s written about that,” she says, wincing and toying with an empty water glass. “At all. It was a long time ago.” Was she aware of it happening around her though? “I still don’t even know half the stuff that went on, so I’m guessing that I was well protected from it. And by the time I was old enough to be aware of it, it was over. Which I think was good for everyone.” Does she ever talk to her father about those times? “I follow my dad on Twitter,” she says. “That’s all I have to say about that.”

She adds that, anyway, her definition of “family” is not traditional. “You choose the people in life who you want to become your main focus. You surround yourself with people you love and who love you, and that, to me, is family.” Her loved ones include her film-producer mother, her nine-year-old stepsister, Grace, and a plethora of friends who have been with her since childhood. And there’s Aunt Julia. She has recently returned from quality time with the latter and her three young cousins in Malibu. She says that she admires her aunt’s career immensely, though her own leanings are less mainstream, and she can’t wait to see Julia in an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel of self-discovery Eat, Pray, Love. I ask her if she’s had therapy. “No comment,” she says, smiling. Is it the done thing for girls your age to go to therapy? “No comment,” still smiling. So if, say, a therapist walked into the room now ... “No comment!”

She will say, however, that the acting life can be lonely. Aged 9, as a kids’ TV addict, she persuaded her mother to allow her to attend her first audition — for the Johnny Depp cocaine movie Blow. She got the part, as Depp’s daughter, and hasn’t stopped working since. There’s been a TV series, Unfabulous, a spin-off album and a series of perky movies, including Aquamarine, Spymate and Wild Child. All of which have played havoc with her love life. “It sounds so weird to say this, but it’s so hard to date people the way you’d normally date,” she says. “You don’t meet people in conventional ways, like in clubs. Then you meet them on movie sets and that doesn’t work out. So the question becomes not, ‘How long is this relationship going to last?’ but, ‘How am I going to meet people in the first place?’ That’s the weird bit.”

Her last big relationship, she confesses, was with her Wild Child co-star and British- born beauty, Alex Pettyfer. Why did it end? “You know,” she says, shrugging. “Sometimes things just don’t work out. Maybe in ten years’ time it’ll work out. Or maybe it was just what it was and ran its course. That’s life, I guess.”

She says that she is resigned, for the moment, to being on her own, and to focusing on a career that includes forthcoming movies such as the Joel Schumacher thriller Twelve and the new drama from the Milk Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black, What’s Wrong with Virginia. (“It’s totally crazy. I play a Mormon.”) Plus she’ll be a self-harming teenager in It’s Kind of a Funny Story, the new movie from the team behind Half Nelson (“I play a cutter! I have cuts on my face. That’s a fun thing to play.”) She says that she has her own writing ambitions, and that though she was accepted into the highly regarded Sarah Lawrence College in New York recently, she’s not sure if long-term study is a viable option at the moment (“I might take short- story writing and psychology for a semester”). In the meantime, she says, she’s getting to grips with life around her, and the reality of being an actress, and a person, in transition.

“Sometimes I’ll be walking around London thinking, ‘This is so weird’,” she says. “You leave somewhere, you come back, and you find yourself sitting in the exact same place, the exact same spot. And that’s when you realise it,” she adds, reaching for the words that only a true 19-year-old on the cusp of megastardom could comprehend. “Everything is the same. And yet everything is different.”