Watch: Julia Roberts and Danny Moder’s 3 Kids Are All Grown Up in Rare Photo
Julia Roberts put acting on the back burner the minute she became a mom almost 22 years ago.
But since the 59-year-old and husband Danny Moder welcomed twins Hazel and Phinnaeus on Nov. 28, 2004, there’s been no point at which her children were not the center of her universe. (And that really started ahead of their birth, when a chance to play “pregnant Julia Roberts” was written into 2004’s Ocean’s Twelve.)
“By the time we had kids, I had accomplished things and felt secure about that part of my life,” the Oscar winner told the Wall Street Journal in 2014. “I was so joyful moving into the family phase of my life in a sincere way.”
In fact, “for a long time,” she continued, the kids “weren’t even aware that I had a job because I was home so much.”
But, as Roberts told Gwyneth Paltrow on The Goop Podcast in October 2018, she simply felt that after nearly two decades of churning out movies she “had earned that time to do whatever I want to do with it, with these new people in our house.”
Son Henry was born on June 18, 2007, and all three kids got wind of what she did for a living eventually.
But even so, if you didn’t witness the Pretty Woman, Notting Hill or Erin Brockovich days firsthand, the stratospheric peak of Roberts’ stardom might have been hard to grasp.
“I don’t think they will ever have a true sense of that,” Roberts acknowledged to Oprah Winfrey in a sit-down with the media mogul for Harper’s Bazaar in 2018. “I think I told you once when they were starting to figure it out, it was like, ‘You’re famous?’ And I said, ‘I think a lot of people might have seen the movie that I’m in or might know who I am.”‘
Roberts recalled that the kids chewed on that for about an hour, before asking her, “Are you more famous than Taylor Swift?”
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images
Kids really do say the darndest things. So we’re guessing their minds were pretty blown when their mother took them to Swift’s 1989 Tour in 2015 and was invited to share the stage with the headliner.
“She was very sweet with my children who had never been to a show before, they are all big fans,” Roberts told Extra afterward. “And she said, ‘Would you mind coming on stage during the song and dancing?’ and I said to my children, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And they all said, ‘Oh, Mom you have to do it!’ and my youngest son said, ‘Only do it if you want to, Mommy.’ It was so sweet!”
Incidentally, Swift’s Valentine’s Day co-star scored a VIP perch next to Travis Kelce when the Eras Tour touched down in Dublin.
Not that Hazel, Finn and Henry didn’t have a variety of clues starting from a young age that their parents didn’t have typical 9-to-5s, whether it was all the travel or playing on film sets and in Broadway theater dressing rooms, or having the occasional Oscar winner (other than their mom) stop by their house in Malibu.
“We’re just grateful for the sense we have of being like any other family down the street,” Roberts told the WSJ. “I don’t question it, frankly.”
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Outerknown
Unlike their neighbors, though (or, maybe just like them, Malibu being a celebrity-friendly enclave), they have a few other spots to hang their hats as well, including the 30-acre ranch near Taos, N.M, where Roberts and Moder tied the knot on July 4, 2002, and where the actress historically loved spending as much time as possible.
But Malibu is where the majority of the family magic has taken place while the kids—who are now all in college—went to school in the L.A. area.
“There are some days when as soon as you’ve finished cooking breakfast and cleaning up the kitchen it’s time to start lunch and by the time you’ve done that you’re doing dinner and thinking there has to be a menu we can order from,” Roberts told the U.K.’s Telegraph in 2009. “But then there are some days when it’s just so creative and so much fun and my kids will help me and, as with anybody who’s a mom or a wife, it just become a part of your day. Some days it’s super-fun and some days it’s a chore.”
But eating together is “really meaningful, and that is the time that we have had some incredible conversations,” Roberts told InStyle in 2017. “I usually have breakfast and dinner with my kids every day. I think it really punctuates, you know, starting things together and sort of processing and winding it down together.”
So, though Roberts logged years as the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, her kids got the full regular-mom treatment at home.
“My husband and I are very aligned on that front and I think that we live a very normal experience with our children,” Roberts explained on ITV’s Lorraine in 2019. “I mean, obviously we have advantages that we didn’t have as children, but I think that’s the unique part of it, coming from the kind of childhood that I had. I raise my kids now—I don’t want them to have some of the struggles that I had, but at the same time, you do need to know how to make your bed and how to do your laundry, and how to be able to make one meal.”
She continued, “These are important life skills, and so you have to weigh the differences between what you look at as some of the hardships that I had, or things that I missed out on as a kid, but also they have to run their own race. They have to have their own experience.”
Meanwhile, Roberts’ experience of so many things for the past 30 years hasn’t been entirely her own, as much as she tries to not let the feedback of strangers affect her at her core, whether the commentary is negative or positive. “There’s something very humbling,” she told Paltrow, “when you have kids and you come home from some event and you have on this big dress and heels and diamonds, and it’s like, ‘Can I have a snack?’ And you go, ‘Yeah.'”
Hazel got a more up-close look at that glam life in July 2021, though, when she made her red carpet debut at 16 at the Cannes Film Festival alongside her dad at a screening of the Sean Penn-directed Flag Day, on which Moder was director of photography.
In 2017, Roberts shared that her daughter had just donated her hair to make wigs for children with cancer. “That’s a big deal for a girl who’s about to be 13 and has this cascading blond hair that gets commented on a lot,” the actress told InStyle. “But she’s so good and brave. She sees it as something else.”
But she was not surprised how the kids she shares with the love of her life turned out.
Danny Moder/Instagram
“The thing is,” she told InStyle, “we have these three human beings who are just a complete reflection of the affection we have for each other.”
She met Moder on the set of the 2001 action caper The Mexican and they’ve been close to inseparable ever since.
She called meeting Moder, 57, a “seismic shift” in her life, saying on The Good Podcast, “It’s some kind of alchemy. He truly to this day, to this minute, is just my favorite human…We’re so lucky in that way, we just really, really like each other.”
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for CORE Gala
Roberts wore her feelings all over at the Sept. 7, 2022, premiere of Ticket to Paradise in the form of a black Alexander McQueen dress customized with hearts surrounding her children’s initials, “JR + DM,” the momentous years “2002,” “2004” and “2007,” and the words “Hope,” “Darling” and “Love” embroidered in crystals.
Reflecting on the ride that’s been parenthood, she said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2017, “You get through it and you figure it out. Everybody does, and it’s a trial and error and a whole lot of tears. And it’s amazing. I have three incredible kids, and to think about when they were teeny tiny. It goes so fast.”
Full speed ahead for more scenes from Julia Roberts’ blissful family world:
Mike Marsland/WireImage
Instagram / Julia Roberts
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Outerknown
Daniel Moder/Instagram
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