Together onscreen again! Julia Roberts and George Clooney costar in the upcoming romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise.
In the film, Roberts and Clooney play a divorced couple who reunite to travel to Bali and stop their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) from impulsively marrying a man she met on vacation. In a trailer for the movie, the stars’ characters run into each other on the plane ride to the Indonesian province. They agree to a truce while they prevent their daughter from making the same mistake they made 25 years prior.
Ticket to Paradise is the Pretty Woman star’s first romantic comedy in decades. In April, she explained to The New York Times why she’s waited so long.
“People sometimes misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by that I haven’t done a romantic comedy as my not wanting to do one. If I had read something that I thought was that Notting Hill level of writing or My Best Friend’s Wedding level of madcap fun, I would do it,” the Erin Brokovich actress said.
She added that Clooney’s involvement also helped to seal the deal. “I thought, ‘Well, disaster, because this only works if it’s George Clooney.’ Lo and behold, George felt it only worked with me. Somehow, we were both able to do it, and off we went,” she said. The two Hollywood icons previously worked together on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Money Monster, Ocean’s Eleven and Oceans Twelve.
The film was cowritten and directed by Ol Parker, best known for writing and directing Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. In a January interview with Deadline, Clooney sang Parker’s praises and called Ticket to Paradise “something special.”
The Up in the Air actor told the outlet, “This guy named Ol Parker is a really wonderful writer and director, and he wrote us a script, and I haven’t done a romantic comedy really since One Fine Day. … I’ve done some sort of snarky ones, you know, and in this one Julia and I just get to be mean to each other in the funniest way.”
He continued on to say that he called Roberts after reading the script to ask if she was going to sign on to the film. “She goes, ‘Are you going to do it?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, if you do it.’ So, it was just one of those very lucky things,” he said.
Dever, who plays Clooney’s daughter in the film, spoke highly of her experience working with the Michael Clayton star.
“He was just like the nicest person in the world,” she revealed during an April appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “He had the whole cast come one day. … We were on this beautiful boat and he fed us all this amazing food, then took us back to his house and cooked us all pizza.”
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