Eric Roberts remained tight-lipped when asked whether his family has read his recently released memoir, Runaway Train: Or the Story of My Life So Far.
“I’ll let you ask them,” Roberts, 68, exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, September 24, after his Dancing With the Stars performance.
In his memoir, Eric touches on his relationships with his sister, Julia Roberts, and his daughter, Emma Roberts, as well as his struggles with addiction. (Eric welcomed Emma, now 33, with ex Kelly Cunningham in 1991.)
After the memoir’s release, Eric said during an interview on News Nation that he hadn’t spoken to Julia, 56, “in a week.” Eric noted that he’s been “out of town” filming season 33 of Dancing With the Stars, which kicked off earlier this month. (Eric and his partner, Britt Stewart, survived Tuesday’s double elimination on the ABC reality series.)
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When asked whether he’s in “regular” communication with Julia — and what he anticipated her thoughts may be after reading the memoir — Eric didn’t offer any details. “You’ll have to ask her, buddy,” he said during the Wednesday, September 25, interview. “If you want her opinion, ask her her opinion. … What you have to understand is [that] my sister and my daughter want to speak for themselves. So I would be trespassing.”
In the book, Eric threw shade at Julia’s performance in Steel Magnolias. “Julia was good in Mystic Pizza, great in Pretty Woman, but not so much in Steel Magnolias, in my opinion, even though it brought Julia her first Academy Award nomination,” Eric wrote in the memoir, per Entertainment Weekly.
“I don’t want to sound like an actor talking, or a jealous sibling, but I don’t think her performance held up in that movie,” Eric continued. “When I saw her in Steel Magnolias, I thought, ‘OK, good, she’s almost a good actor, and one day she’s gonna be one.’”
While reflecting on his decision to include his true feelings on Julia’s role in the 1989 film, Eric claimed it “never occurred” to him that the comment may gain attention until after the book was written. “I don’t write a book with [headlines] in mind,” he said. “Especially a personal book like this.”
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Eric pointed out that he said “great things” about Julia in the memoir. “My sister’s a great actor,” he said. “I just didn’t like that movie. I thought it was a melodrama, I thought it was a soap opera. But that’s an opinion. And like a nose, we all have one.”
Rumors of drama between the siblings have circulated through the years, but Eric said during a June 2022 appearance on the “Behind the Velvet Rope With David Yontef” podcast that they “have always been fine.”
He noted at the time that he thinks the speculation of tension between him and Julia stemmed from an interview. “I think years and years ago, I was doing a press tour for some movie … It was just when Pretty Woman [had been] released, and so they’re asking a bunch of questions about Julia. And I said, ‘Hey, excuse me. Can we talk about me?’” he recalled.
With reporting by Carly Konsker
