Julia Roberts Eats, Prays, and Loves

Julia Roberts is back with her first leading role in a decade in the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat Pray Love.

The actress spoke to Entertainment Weekly about eating pizza for hours on end, gaining weight, and never using a spit-bucket.

On pizza:

When we were in Naples, we started shooting at 8 in the morning, and I think by 8:45 I’d eaten 8 or 10 pieces of pizza. Pizza was what I ate all day that day.

On gaining weight:

You know, we talked about that. Because I didn’t want people to say, “Well, she’s supposed to go to Italy and eat all this food, but she looks the same in the whole thing.” So I talked to [director] Ryan [Murphy] about it. And one of the things I love the most about Ryan is that he has a real legitimate answer for everything. There’s nothing that he hasn’t considered weeks before I’ve thought of the question. When it came to that, I said, “What do we do?” And he said, “By the time Liz got to Italy, she was so underweight that the weight she put on really got her back to normal and then a little bit more.” It wasn’t like she [became] a tub. So because I started at normal weight for me, by the time we left Rome and I was 7 to 10 pounds heavier, that was probably the truth of what she was dealing with. I could’ve used a bigger pair of jeans when I went off to India!

On the spit-bucket:

Well, first of all, that grosses me out. But the truth of the matter is, there probably would have come a point when I would have used it.