There are very few acting luminaries who transcend generations and are revered by baby boomers and millennials. julia robert is one of them. A voucher A-list with excess charm. Although she thankfully never retired from acting, she has been missed by recent award-winning or culture-defining blockbusters. released. But good news: Robert is back in the game.
She joined the cast for Leave the world behind a Netflix film adaptation of the famous novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam. The streamer has won the bidding war against other services in 2020, signaling that the release will be A Very Big Deal, and confirmed by big names who have also signed up, including Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold.
There is huge anticipation for the movie after the book was met with great cultural hype and positive critical reception. A National Book Award finalist, it was also (perhaps most impressively) one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021.
This could truly be one of the biggest films of this year and subsequently mark the start of Robert’s big comeback.
Steel Magnolias, A pretty woman and Erin Brockovitch won Roberts both critical acclaim and prestigious awards from the late ’80s through the 2000s, but she hasn’t taken a drama to those levels in some time. The actor returned to the big screen last year with a romantic comedy ticket to paradise, alongside George Clooney, and directed the Amazon Prime mid-series Back home since its release in 2018.
The last serious project she undertook would have been Ben is back five years ago, where she starred alongside Lucas Hedges as a mother who tries to help her son, a drug addict, after he returns from rehab. While the film’s reception and her performance were quite positive, it’s been a lifetime and a global pandemic since we’ve seen Roberts take center stage in a film.
The book itself offers a lot of heavy material, with parenting, race and class being at the forefront of Leave the world behind. The thriller, Alam’s third novel, is a disturbing apocalypse novel set in New York State, USA, and follows two families: one who rents an Airbnb and the owners of the rental, who are forced to meet for a long weekend.
After an inexplicable power outage cuts the two families off from the rest of the world, the characters’ responses, often jarring and incongruous with the scale of what’s happening, are reminiscent of the questionable and confusing ways we’ve all faced a global pandemic not too long ago.
Other themes include “technology and our strange addiction to it“, or “race and the very complicated ways in which race defines people in our country and in our culture,” said Alam. The Paris Review.
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