Julia Stiles Says Julia Roberts Gave Her ‘Amazing’ Advice When She Was Struggling with Body Image

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.”