Julia Roberts Tears Up While Reflecting on ‘Erin Brockovich’ 25 Years Later, Pays Warm Tribute to Late Costar Albert Finney

Julia Roberts is reflecting on her role as activist Erin Brockovich in the eponymous 2000 biopic.

In an interview on The Late Show, the 58-year-old actress told host Stephen Colbert that her late co-star, Albert Finney, remains a highlight of shooting the film.

“You’re determined to make me cry,” Roberts told Colbert, 61, at the mention of Finney’s name. “When I think about that movie, you know, I do think about Albert.”

The famed British actor died at age 82 in 2019. Finney was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as Ed Masry in Erin Brockovich.

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She continued: “You know, it doesn’t take an enormous amount of effort to do acting…. But it was so easy, that movie. Everybody was so easy. There was just a flow. The days were great, and it was just a job that felt very kind to the inside of me.”

Roberts went on to describe how the cast and crew were “living at the Holiday Inn” in a small town while filming the movie, which was directed by Steven Soderbergh.

“In the center of this big parking lot where the Holiday Inn was a one-screen movie theater — and it’s the kind of movie theater that, when I was a kid, we would call it the ‘sticky shoe theater’ …. and Steven Soderbergh, our director, would bring movies sometimes for us to all go watch because there was really not a lot for us to do on the weekends,” Roberts said.

She added: “And he had Animal House one weekend, and he had the movie poster — it was like, you walked in and you were transported, it was so fun. And Albert showed up in his bed sheet [fashioned like a toga] and he was like, ‘I thought it was a thing. I thought that we were all gonna do this.’ ”

“And he looked great,” Roberts added. “And I would have just walked across the parking lot — maybe changed. Albert just sat down with his popcorn and, there we were.”

The film centered on a real-life woman named Erin Brockavich who, in 1993, became a whistleblower when she noticed illnesses in Hinkley, Calif., that she thought may have been tied to a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) plant. Three years later, the case was settled, breaking the record for the largest settlement in a direct-action lawsuit. Brockovich continued working in law and four years after the settlement, her story was immortalized in the award-winning film.