Julia Roberts says 'Pretty Woman' originally had a very different ending
Julia Roberts would have been part of a very different "Pretty Woman" if the fates hadn't intervened.
The Oscar winner revealed that the original script was very dark and gritty compared to the rom-com it's now known as.
During Variety's "Actors on Actors" interview, Roberts, 51, told fellow actress Patricia Arquette that she auditioned, at first, for a very different movie.
“So many, many, many years ago, one of my early auditions was for a movie called '3,000,'” Arquette said. “Most people don’t know that '3,000' was the original 'Pretty Woman' script. And the ending was really heavy.”
Roberts described how that "3,000" ended with her character being shoved out of a car and someone "threw the money on top of her, as memory serves, and just drove away, leaving her in some dirty alley.”
“So it really read like a gritty art movie,” Arquette added. “When you first read it, it was that incarnation.”
Roberts explained that the "small movie company" that owned the movie rights "folded over the weekend" so she was out of a job pretty quickly. But soon after, Disney picked up the script and the producer.
“I thought, ‘Went to Disney? Are they going to animate it?’” the "Homecoming" star added. “[Director] Garry Marshall came on, and because he’s a great human being, he felt it would only be fair to meet me, since I had this job for three days and lost it. And they changed the whole thing. And it became more something that is in my wheelhouse.”
“Thank God it fell apart," Roberts added because she felt she "couldn't do" that original role.