Paula Patton is hoping her son, Julian, will one day join the family business.
“You know, he loves to sing and he loves directing,” Patton, 49, exclusively told Us Weekly of her 15-year-old son on Wednesday, July 16, while attending Lifetime’s Summer Soiree at Calabra Rooftop Restaurant & Bar at Santa Monica Proper Hotel.
“He’s in film school, like he’s not — at this school, they have a film program, even though it’s a high school,” she continued. “And so he’s like, ‘Mom, can I be a director and a singer?’ And I was like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ So that’s his journey right now.”
Patton shares Julian with ex-husband Robin Thicke. The pair were a couple for over two decades, eventually saying “I do” in 2005 after years of dating. They separated in 2014 and finalized their divorce in 2015.
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“There’s so much emotion when you first break up, and there’s so much stuff that spills over,” Thicke told People of his coparenting relationship with Patton in 2021. “But time heals those wounds, and she’s an incredible person.”
He continued, “Once you can put yourself second, your son rises to the top and you go, ‘It’s not about us anymore.’ We’re very lucky the way everything has worked out.”
While the pair’s son continues to explore a potential Hollywood career, Patton says there’s one talent he has already mastered — vacation planning.
“It was incredible. Talk about faith,” Patton told Us of their recent trip to Iceland. “He’s 15 years old … He wanted to plan the whole thing. He’s like, ‘Trust me, mom.’ And he literally laid out the entire itinerary, every single day. What we were doing — where we were even having lunch and dinner. And I just, I didn’t even know how you spelled half these places, more or less said them. You know?”
She added, “Sounds so wild. And we just walked on faith and Julian took us, my mom and I.”
While Patton continues to enjoy life as a mom, she’s also focused on her career, which includes starring in the new, faith-based movie Finding Faith. The film centers around a woman who is determined to rebuild her life after a tragedy.
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For Patton, the material hits close to home.
“I mean, it’s really about how this movie came to be — it came to me on a day when I was anxious and scared, and after I meditated and prayed I just said, ‘God, I give it to you.’ I want to walk this week as if everything is working out in my favor even though I can’t see how it’s going to, right?”
She continued, “And all of a sudden, this peace came over me. And then three hours later, my friend and neighbor, Charles Porter, called me up, and he’s like, ‘I’ve got this script for you, and it’s called Finding Faith.’ And I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me, on this day that I actually had genuinely found it.’ And then I read it and it really mirrored, suddenly, a journey I had been on … having gone through addiction and finding a way out of it. So it was — it resonated deeply.”
Patton went on to explain that once she got sober she was able to trust that “whatever God and the universe had for me, I could handle.”
