I Was Shocked When I Heard That This Oscar-Winning Icon Didn’t Get Along With Steven Spielberg — but There’s a Good Reason Why
In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts ruled Hollywood. Spielberg was already one of the most successful directors of all time and was just coming off of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Meanwhile, Roberts had become America’s sweetheart with Pretty Woman in 1990. It should have been a match made in movie heaven when the pair came together for 1991’s Hook, a reimagining of Peter Pan, with Robin Williams as Peter Pan, Dustin Hoffman as the titular Captain James Hook, and Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell. Instead, the movie-making process was such a stressful mess that it led to some harsh words between Spielberg and Roberts in the media. Sadly, the two have never worked together since. So what went wrong?
Steven Spielberg Isn’t a Fan of ‘Hook’
Hook came out in theaters on December 11, 1991, and went on to make a respectable $119.6 million domestically on a $70 million budget, but it wasn’t quite the mammoth blockbuster family film Steven Spielberg was used to. That was a bit of a surprise given all the star power involved, along with the intriguing premise of a grown-up Peter Pan, but audiences just weren’t overly interested. Critics weren’t blown away either. In his written review, Roger Ebert gave Hook two stars, calling it lugubrious and excessive, writing, “we get the uncanny suspicion that Hook was written and directed according to the famous recipe of the country preacher who told the folks what he was going to tell them, told them, and then told them what he had told them.”
Ebert wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Hook. Even Steven Spielberg, the guy who made it, wasn’t a fan of the final product. In a 2018 interview with Empire Magazine, the director admitted that he thought he was out of his depth, adding:
“I felt like a fish out of water making Hook. I didn’t have confidence in the script. I had confidence in the first act, and I had confidence in the epilogue. I didn’t have confidence in the body of it. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, and I tried to paint over my insecurity with production value, the more insecure I felt about it, the bigger and more colourful the sets became.”
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Hook may have been a bit of a disappointment in 1991, but over the past three decades, it has become an imperfect classic passed down over generations. Fans look at it fondly now, but time has not saved the relationship between Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts, which all came crashing down during Hook and its aftermath.
Julia Roberts Didn’t Like That Steven Spielberg Didn’t Defend Her
In a 1992 talk on 60 Minutes to help promote Hook, Steven Spielberg was asked about working with Julia Roberts, who was often rumored to rub people the wrong way with her off-putting behavior on movie sets. That sounds the exact opposite of the Julia Roberts we know on-screen and from interviews, but something happened between Spielberg and Roberts on Hook, because the director said, “It was an unfortunate time for us to work together, but I think that Julia is a really, really good actress.” In his nicest way, he was trying to say that Roberts was hard to work with without actually saying Roberts was hard to work with. When Ed Bradley asked if he had any hesitations about working with her again, Spielberg had the chance to put any bad blood or rumors of it to rest, but he made it worse by smiling and saying, “This is a 60 Minutes question, isn’t it?” This was in reference to 60 Minutes‘ type of journalism, where they ask their subjects hard questions and hoped for a headline-grabbing answer.
Steven Spielberg didn’t take the opportunity to discuss how the chatter that Julia Roberts’ behavior was untrue. Instead, he tried his best not to talk about her at all, and Julia Roberts noticed. She held on to those answers for seven years, and when it came up in a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair, unlike Spielberg, she didn’t hold back on the Hook bad behavior talk and Spielberg’s response, telling the magazine:
“Hand to God: not a thing I read about that was truthful, and it really hurt my feelings. Because not only did it make me sound mean, but it was a situation where people who knew the truth talked about it in a way that wasn’t untruthful. I saw that and my eyes popped out of my head. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that this person that I knew and trusted was actually hesitating to come to my defense. It was a hard lesson to learn. It was the first time that I felt I had a turncoat in my midst.”
In the years since, Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts haven’t spoken about what happened on Hook, but whatever went down, it and its aftermath were bad enough that the two giants never worked together again. However, during a one-on-one for Vogue in 2024 with Richard Curtis, who directed Roberts in Notting Hill, he admitted that he was scared of her when he first met the actress, but she later told him she was careful not to be too friendly on movie sets because someone will always take advantage of it. Is that what happened with Hook? Is Julia Roberts simply more reserved when filming, which can come off as mean, or is that distance keeping what she learned because of Hook? Whatever went down, it’s a shame that Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts couldn’t make amends. Maybe one day they will while there’s still time.
