Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant made Notting Hill in 1998 and produced something that the romantic comedy genre had been building toward for decades without quite knowing how to get there — a film so completely, so effortlessly charming and so genuinely affecting that it stopped being a movie people went to see and became a movie people returned to, the kind that finds you at different stages of your life and means something slightly different each time and never means nothing.
The chemistry between them was so immediately apparent and so completely real that the audience watching Anna Scott fall for William Thacker fell alongside her, and the question of what existed between the two actors creating that chemistry — whether the warmth and the ease and the specific, crackling electricity of their scenes together was entirely manufactured for the camera or whether something genuine was being caught on film as well as created — has been one of the more pleasantly persistent questions in the romantic comedy genre’s recent history. Julia Roberts has spoken about Hugh Grant across the years with the warmth and the wit that their on-screen dynamic always suggested existed off it as well — the two of them giving the occasional joint interview that produces more laughter than information and more affection than revelation, maintaining the particular friendship of two people who made something together that they are both proud of and who like each other genuinely enough that the professional occasion never feels entirely sufficient to contain it. At 64, with the particular freedom that comes from having lived a full enough life to understand which stories are worth telling completely, Julia Roberts has finally revealed what really happened with Hugh Grant on Notting Hill — not the press junket version and not the carefully diplomatic account of two co-stars who got along well, but the honest, specific, completely her own account of what it was actually like to make that film with that person at that moment in both their lives, and what it produced between them that the finished film only partially captured.
