Julia Stiles Says Julia Roberts Gave Her ‘Amazing’ Advice When She Was Struggling with Body Image
The actresses starred alongside each other in 2003’s ‘Mona Lisa Smile’
Julia Stiles revealed her struggles with body image as an actress in Hollywood
The 10 Things I Hate About You actress also starred in Mona Lisa Smile alongside Julia Roberts
Stiles says Roberts was amazing on set and gave her and their other young cast members words of advice that boosted their confidence
In addition to being a great actress, Julia Roberts is also a confidant and mother figure, according to Julia Stiles.
The 10 Things I Hate About You actress, 44, appeared on the May 20 episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day and revealed that she used to struggle with her body image. During this time, Stiles revealed that Roberts gave her a confidence boost while starring in 2003’s Mona Lisa Smile together.
“She was an amazing example for us, and she was so maternal with all the young women on that set,” Stiles recalled. “She was coming from a lot of experience of being not just a woman, but also a woman where your appearance is focused on so heavily.”
She continued, “[Roberts] said to us, “You’re going to look back on these photos of you in your 20s and be like, I was beautiful — why didn’t I see that?” And she’s totally right!”
Stiles previously gushed over Roberts’ on-set demeanor while filming Mona Lisa Smile during a January appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.
“She took care of all the girls on that set, in a way she didn’t really [have to],” she said of Roberts, 57. “The movie hinged on [Roberts] — she’s a huge star; everything was riding on her performance in this movie, and yet she took the time to be really kind and generous to all the young women that were in it.”
Mona Lisa Smile sees Roberts starring as Katherine Ann Watson, who accepts an Art History teaching position at Wellesley College in the 1950s and seeks to enlighten her young students, which includes Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst and Ginnifer Goodwin.
Elsewhere in the podcast episode, Stiles admitted that she has struggled with restrictive eating in the past, with Hollywood pressures being the root cause of her body issues.
“I’m not talking about an eating disorder — it was just restrictive, regimented, stressful. I always worried that it was going to be out of my control. Like, what if I gain weight?” she told Day. “I couldn’t help but have a disordered relationship with it all.”
“There was stress around what your body looks like and trying to mold your body into a certain size,” she added. “As an actress, we go and promote on a red carpet, and we have to wear sample sizes from fashion designers. So it’s always, “Are we going to fit into the sample size?”‘
Ultimately, becoming a mother to her and husband Preston Cook’s three children, Strummer, Arlo and Henry, allowed Stiles to realize the obsessing over her body was “a waste of f—— time.”
“I’ve moved on,” she said. “I’ve learned to be kinder in the way I think about my body and look at my body — to be kinder to myself but also trust your body … I would be running on fumes, like, no sleep having just had a five-month-old baby. I didn’t have time to think about, am I going to get back in shape to fit into those sample sizes?”
Pro Boxer Georgia O’Connor Dies at 25 Just 2 Weeks After Marrying ‘The Love of My Life’
O’Connor’s final Instagram post announced her marriage to Adriano Cardinali
Georgia O’Connor died at 25, months after revealing she was diagnosed with cancer
Just weeks before her death, she married her longtime boyfriend Adriano Cardinali
The professional boxer blamed doctors for ignoring her, and failing to run tests that could have detected her cancer sooner
Georgia O’Connor made one last wish come true before her death.
The death of the 25-year-old British professional boxer was announced on Thursday, May 22, by her promoter, Boxxer, in a statement obtained by The Guardian. O’Connor revealed in January that she had been diagnosed with cancer. In February, she said she suffered a miscarriage.
Just two weeks before her death, O’Connor tied the knot with her longtime boyfriend Adriano Cardinali.
“09.05.2025. The day I married the love of my life. 🤍,” O’Connor wrote alongside an image of her husband’s hand over her own.
Her photo showed the couple both wearing their wedding rings as she held a bouquet of white roses and baby’s breath. It was the last post she shared, uploaded on May 12.
Before her wedding announcement, O’Connor last shared an Instagram photo of herself with Cardinali for his birthday in February, where she referred to him as “my Italian prince.”
“I never in my life thought I would find someone like you. Someone with such a pure heart and soul, someone who makes me feel loved every day, someone who would do absolutely anything for me… someone as weird as me,” she wrote.
Her words captioned a single photo of the couple sitting in a restaurant booth together, both smiling at the camera as they posed with drinks in front of them.
“You are not just my boyfriend but my truest and closest friend,” O’Connor continued.
She also mentioned that the longtime loves “have been through so much together, things that no couple should go through but we always get through because nothing can ever break us.”
“I couldn’t imagine life without you and I adore you from the deepest parts of my heart,” she wrote, later concluding, “you are the best thing that ever happened to me and being your girlfriend is the greatest title I could ever wish to have.”
When O’Connor revealed her cancer diagnosis in January, she made a post calling out “the absolute incompetent RATS that have allowed this to happen.”
“For 17 weeks since the start of October, I’ve been in constant pain,” she wrote on Jan. 31.
Her post was a single image of her sitting in a hospital bed, hooked to multiple machines as she smiled and gave a “thumbs up” sign.
The pro athlete said she knew “something was seriously wrong” and felt that she had cancer because “I have colitis and PSC [primary sclerosing cholangitis — a chronic liver disease], two diseases that dramatically increase the chances of getting it.”
“I KNOW how high my risk is and they do too. They always did. But not one doctor f—— listened to me. Not one doctor took me seriously,” O’Connor wrote.
She said she “begged” doctors to run tests, but they refused. “One even told me that it’s ‘all in my head.’ And now? Now the cancer has spread,” O’Connor wrote.
O’Connor was undefeated in her boxing matches since turning pro in 2021, and won several high-ranking titles, including a bronze medal at the 2018 Youth World Championships as an amateur fighter.
“Georgia was loved, respected and admired,” Boxxer said in their statement after her death.