'Eat Pray Love' Director Reveals Truth About Julia Roberts' Weight Gain

Whenever an actor gains weight for a role, they get lots of acclaim and awards. It all goes back to Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull. Julia Roberts didn’t quite go that far for her latest movie, but Eat Pray Love required her to gain a few pounds to play author Liz Gilbert. The film’s director, Ryan Murphy, explained how he talked America’s Sweetheart into it.


“Well, I didn’t want to do it with fat pads because I thought that would be awful and Julia would never do that as a great actor,” Murphy said. “So I think the thing that I did do to protect that was to shoot the movie in chronological order, which is what happened to Liz Gilbert. She went to Rome and gained 10 pounds and then went to India and lost the weight. We shot that in a way where that actually did happen.”
In Gilbert’s case, she was already underweight from suffering depression. Gaining the weight actually got her closer to a healthy state. “I talked to Liz a lot about that. She was undernourished because she was in a depression. So her version of gaining 10 pounds is not my version of gaining 10 pounds. It’s not startling but it’s real. There’s a scene in the movie where Julia struggles to button jeans in a jean store that I think every woman in the world has gone through. That was a real moment for Julia. We really made that work for her. She wanted to.”
For the old school Julia Roberts fans, there are still plenty of wardrobe changes. “She had a couple favorite ones. I know she liked the Indian wedding green sari one and I know she loved the one that she wore in her Javier Bardem seduction because it was very real to her. But not since Scarlett O’Hara has there been a woman who has more costume changes than Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love because she’s in every scene.”