There's very few acting luminaries who transcend generations and are revered by boomers and millennials alike. Julia Roberts is one of them. A proper A-lister with charm in excess. While she thankfully never retired from the acting world altogether, she's been missed from the recent award-winning blockbusters or culture-defining releases. But good news: Roberts is back in the game.
The streamer is battling the decision to be populist or specialist, and original programming is the collateral
She's joined the cast for Leave the World Behind, a Netflix movie adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s acclaimed novel of the same name. The streamer won the bidding war against other services in 2020 signalling the release will be A Very Big Deal, and confirmed by the huge names who have also signed on, including Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha'la Herrold.
There's huge anticipation for the film after the book was met by big cultural hype and a positive critical reception. A finalist for the National Book Award it was also (perhaps most impressively) one of Barack Obama's favourite books of 2021.
This truly could be one of the biggest films of this year, and subsequently mark the beginning of Robert's big return.
Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich won Roberts both critical acclaim and prestigious awards from the late ‘80s to ’00s, but she hasn't taken on a drama of those levels in some time. The actor returned to the big screen last year with rom-com Ticket to Paradise, starring alongside George Clooney, and has led the middling Amazon Prime series Homecoming since release in 2018.
The last gritty project she took on would have been Ben is Back five years ago, where she starred alongside Lucas Hedges as a mother who tries to help her son, an addict, after he returns home from rehab. Whilst reception to the film and her performance was fairly positive, it's been a whole lifetime and a global pandemic since we saw Roberts take centre stage in a film.
The book itself offers a lot of weighty material, with parenthood, race and class are 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 together for a long weekend.
After an inexplicable blackout cuts both families off from the rest of the world, the characters' responses, often jarring and incongruent with the scale of what is happening, call back to the questionable and confusing ways we all dealt with a global pandemic not too long ago.
Other themes include "technology and our strange dependence on it", or "race and the very complicated ways in which race defines people in our country and in our culture", Alam told The Paris Review.
Huge names are scattered all over this project. The film will also be directed and adapted by Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot), whilst Alam will serve as executive producer along with Barack and Michelle Obama, Tonia Davis, Daniel M. Stillman, Nick Krishnamurthy. Esmail, Julia Roberts, Chad Hamilton, Lisa Gillan, and Marisa Yeres Gill will be producing. Leave the World Behind’s cast also includes Farrah Mackenzie, Charlie Evans, and Kevin Bacon.
Netlix have confirmed the film will be released this year on 8 December. That release schedule was first teased as part of a compilation of first-look footage from upcoming Netflix releases. You'll see a glimpse of Leave the World Behind around the 1:57 mark. We're briefly treated to a shot of Ali in a huge traffic jam, a distressing news report and Roberts saying: “Something is happening and I don't trust them.”
