Do we like Julia Roberts?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of showing up for LGBTQ+ kids and speaking against predatory men, with only a clumsy red-carpet joke and a contested film to mark it.
Born in Atlanta in 1967, Roberts grew up around theatre: her parents ran the Actors and Writers Workshop, which the Georgia Encyclopedia calls the city's only integrated theatre company at the time. Her parents divorced in 1971, and she was raised in Smyrna by her mother. She followed her siblings to New York after high school.
The career arc is a long one. Steel Magnolias got her noticed, Pretty Woman made her a global star in 1990, and she then stepped back from film for a couple of years as the attention on her private life got intense. She came roaring back with My Best Friend's Wedding, Notting Hill and an Oscar for Erin Brockovich.
On the harm test, she's as clean as they come. In 2014 GLSEN gave her its Humanitarian Award for anti-bullying work, and in 2017 she backed LGBTQ+ students under the Trump administration, saying she wanted all students to feel safe, and told trans students they were loved. We found no harmful words and no dodgy company in the sources we read.
Her latest stoush is about a film, not conduct. After the Hunt, which premiered at Venice in 2025, copped criticism that it revived old arguments about believing women. Roberts replied that it wasn't pitting women against each other and that a film getting people talking is the point. Where you land depends on whether you read the film as muddying the waters or as a messy conversation starter.
The one slip on the nice side was small. At the January 2026 Golden Globes she joked that Teyana Taylor needed a sandwich, and some online critics took it badly. Taylor said she took it lightly and has since called them instant besties, so we'd call it a clumsy quip, not a pattern.
In June 2026 she joined a Jane Fonda-led concert for the First Amendment and read a poem for Renee Nicole Good, a queer mother killed by a federal officer. Conservative outlets mocked the night; her supporters will see a star using her platform for someone else. That's the pattern across the record.