Julia Roberts has said a remake of Pretty Woman would be “impossible,” citing both her own life experience and major cultural shifts since the romantic comedy’s release in 1990.
The Oscar-winning actress, now 58, played Vivian Ward, a young sex worker who forms an unlikely relationship with wealthy businessman Edward Lewis, portrayed by Richard Gere, in the film that helped launch her to global stardom. Speaking to Deadline, Roberts explained that revisiting the role—or even reimagining the story today—would be deeply challenging.
“Oh, it’s impossible,” she said. “I have too many years of the weight of the world inside of me now that I wouldn’t be able to kind of levitate in a movie like that.”
Roberts clarified that she did not mean “weight of the world” in a negative sense, but rather the accumulation of life experience. “All the things that we learn, all the things that we put in our pockets along the lane,” she explained, adding that it would be impossible for her now to play someone with the same level of innocence. “It’s a funny thing to say about a hooker, but I do think that there was an innocence to her… I guess it’s just being young.”
Beyond her own personal evolution, Roberts acknowledged that changing cultural attitudes would make a modern version of Pretty Woman difficult to justify. The film’s central premise—an escort rescued from poverty by a wealthy man—has increasingly been re-examined through a contemporary lens.
“Anytime you have a huge passage of time and cultural shifts,” she said, “think about all the movies and plays of the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s. You look at them now and think, ‘How are people saying these things, doing these things?’”
Roberts pointed to classic films such as 1939’s Gone With the Wind as examples of works that reflect the values and blind spots of their era, noting that art inevitably changes as society evolves. “These are the choices that we make as artists, as art appreciators, and as people who love books and theatre,” she said. “Times change, people change, ideas change.”
The actress also reflected on another of her most beloved romantic comedies, Notting Hill (1999), in which she starred opposite Hugh Grant. Roberts admitted she initially dismissed the project outright. “I thought, ‘That sounds like the dumbest idea of any movie I could ever do,’” she recalled, joking that playing the world’s biggest movie star falling for a London bookseller sounded “so stupid.”
However, after reading the script and meeting writer Richard Curtis, producer Duncan Kenworthy, and director Roger Michell, her perspective shifted. “It was so charming and funny,” she said, praising the cast and Michell’s direction for making the film such a lasting success.
While Pretty Woman remains a defining classic of 1990s cinema, Roberts’ reflections suggest it belongs firmly to its time—an artefact of a different era rather than a story easily retold today.
