Emma Roberts just turned 18. She's no longer the adorable kid audiences remember from her Nickelodeon TV show "Unfabulous" and as the eagle-eyed sleuth in "Nancy Drew."
Signaling her coming of age, Roberts appears in her first love scene in the new suburban family drama "Lymelife." She plays a teen in a troubled household. Mom (Cynthia Nixon) is carrying on an affair while Dad (Timothy Hutton) wastes away from Lyme disease. Her next-door neighbor (Rory Culkin) lusts after her, resulting in a bedroom rendezvous.
After the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Roberts talked at a local cafe about the planning that went into her first big-screen romance. She's shorter than she looks onscreen -- a mere 5-feet-2 -- and was bundled up in a parka. Her full lips and ear-to-ear smile remind you of the actress she refers to as "my aunt" and everyone else knows as Julia Roberts.
Like many child stars, Emma is eager to please and hyper mature. She's been surrounded by adult conversation since she was 10 and co-starred with Johnny Depp in the R-rated "Blow" and has been rigorously disciplined on movie sets. When her workday is over, she studies for three hours with a private tutor, working toward a General Educational Development certificate.
While a manager advises her, Roberts emphasized that she decides which parts to accept.
"At the end of the day, I am the one who is going to be onscreen, so it is kind of up to me," she said.
"Lymelife" appealed to her because it allowed her to show she's no longer a little girl, but do so in a modulated way.
"There are a lot of young actresses who have been doing movies, and then all of a sudden they just do something completely outrageous," she said. "They will do a spread in a magazine or all of a sudden try to be very provocative in a certain movie. They're grown-up, but, like, to an extreme. I think you have to make a transition. You can't just all of a sudden be like that."
Her role model for how to ease into adult roles is Anne Hathaway.
"She has done an amazing job of going from teen star to serious actress," Roberts said. "It is crazy to think she was just in 'Princess Diaries' and now she is being nominated for an Oscar. She matured slowly, and now everyone is taking her seriously."
The kissing scene with Culkin was easier to do than Roberts thought. It helped that the set was closed, meaning that the only people there besides the actors were director Derick Martini and cinematographer Frank Godwin.
By the time the scene was shot, she and Culkin, who previously didn't know each other, had become "good friends, so it wasn't really that awkward. We talked about it before and that made it much easier. Rory is really a great guy," Roberts said. "I mean, I was definitely nervous. I kind of felt uncomfortable, but at the same time I think it worked for the scene because it is supposed to be our first time, and we are supposed to not know what we are doing."
Like Roberts, Culkin comes from an acting family. His brother Kieran plays his brother in "Lymelife," and their older brother Macaulay was a child star.
Roberts says she and Rory never talked about their relatives in the movie business. But it has occurred to her that the ability to act might be genetic.
Along with her Aunt Julia, her father, Eric Roberts, also acts. Her parents, who weren't married, split shortly after she was born. In a 2005 interview, Emma acknowledged that she is closer to her mother, Kelly Cunningham, and stepfather, former L.A. Guns bassist Kelly Nickels, than her father.
Her only comment about her dad on this day was to jokingly blame him for her height.
"He's short. No one in my family is really tall except my aunt, who is kind of tall," she said. "I'm not getting any taller, I know that. This is the top of the line for me."
Roberts is grateful to set technicians who make her appear taller. This bit of "movie magic," as she calls it, is as simple as standing on an apple box when she does a scene with a tall co-star.
After eight years, her enthusiasm for making movies is unabated. Roberts says she loves becoming a "completely different character each time" and getting under the character's skin and analyzing her. For instance, she describes the girl in "Lymelife" as "very confused. She doesn't know what she really wants. She wants to be sexy, but she also wants to be a kid."
"I love being on a movie set and really enjoy all the traveling I get to do and meeting new people," Roberts said.
Aunt Julia has not offered any sage advice on how to succeed in movies -- although she would be an expert on that subject.
"We never really talk about careers," Roberts said. "When we are together it's kind of like, 'Oh, are you working on anything? Yeah, is it good?' And that is it. We don't really go into much detail about it."
Working on "Lymelife" and with Sam Rockwell in "The Winning Season" -- in which she portrays a basketball player (bring on the apple boxes!) -- has made her a fan of independent filmmaking.
"It is like totally a different vibe," she said. "Only you and the director are creating your character, whereas in big studio movies you have to be listening to everyone's opinion. I feel like independents are much more real because you only get a couple of takes, whereas on a studio movie you are doing sometimes 20 or 30 takes."
Roberts has made forays into pop music with an album, "Unfabulous and More." Both that and movies are going to take a back seat in September when Roberts starts college. She decided this was something she wanted to do and points out that Jodie Foster and Natalie Portman, two other role models, went to college.
"I think college would be a really cool experience, especially since I have never been in high school," Roberts said. "If a really good movie project comes along, I will leave and go do that. But I'm not going to leave for just anything. It has to be great."
(E-mail Ruthe Stein at pinkletters(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco ChronicleHigh Profile
Post new comment