Emma Roberts, the star of the new Warner Bros Pictures Nancy Drew movie, comes from a showbiz family (her aunt’s Julia Roberts and her father’s Eric Roberts) yet the teen actress is very self-reliant when it comes to picking film roles and deciding on how to play different characters. She’d love to work with her aunt sometime in the future but for the most part, her famous relatives stay out of her career. “It’s mostly like kind of my manager and me and my mom, but I get to decide if I like something. Nobody’s going to make me do something I don’t want to do, so that’s really good.”
Nancy Drew caught Roberts’ attention as soon as she heard about the script. Roberts didn’t read the Nancy Drew books when she was younger but she was familiar with the character and what it meant to generations of readers. “Nancy Drew is such an iconic character and she’s a really, really great character that’s been around for decades,” explained Roberts. “I read the script and I instantly clicked with it and loved the character and loved the whole storyline.”
Emma Roberts swears that Nancy Drew is now her favorite detective, with Sherlock Holmes running a distant second. “I think Nancy Drew is so cool because she really is like…when she first came out in the books there weren’t a lot of young teen girls that independent and that sure of themselves and stuff like that, at least not in movies and books,” said Roberts. “There still aren’t many, I can’t think of any. So, I think that’s really cool about her.”
There were a few similarities between the actress and her character. “I mean, we’re both alike in some ways. We’re determined, ambitious, curious… But I think she’s much more of a neat freak than I am.” Roberts could relate to different aspects of the character although she’s never played anyone quite like her before. “…Just getting into the character was really fun, but definitely different from anything I’ve ever done. They cut my hair and they dyed it. I went to the set every day and the hair and makeup was just so different than anything I was used to, and the same with the wardrobe. But that’s what made it really fun. I don’t think it’s fun to always play the same character over and over again. You want to do something different.”
Unlike Roberts, Nancy Drew is a bit of an outcast in that she’s old-fashioned and very proper, two personality traits which set her apart from her high school classmates. Although she hasn’t experienced being the brunt of jokes at school, Roberts did her best to offer advice to teens going through that type of situation. “It’s just so tough because you really can’t do anything about it because wherever you go to school there will always be like cliques and always be those girls,” said Roberts. “People who say there aren’t cliques at their school are lying because there are cliques everywhere, you know. But I would just say you just have to find a group of friends and try not to let it bother you and don’t feed into it.”
Roberts didn’t keep any of her Nancy Drew wardrobe but did enjoy dressing up as the teen sleuth, even though the clothes were very different from what fills her closet at home. “Personally I liked going to the set everyday and getting to dress up as her. All the clothes were made one-of-a-kind for the movie by the costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, which I just thought was really cool that we were using things that nobody else would be wearing just because they were just for us.”
If Nancy Drew catches on with audiences, there’s a possibility of a sequel. And Roberts says she’s ready to take on the iconic character again. “I think it would be so much fun to get to play her all over again and have a new set of cute clothes and a new mystery to solve.”
Adding Nancy Drew to her list of credits has opened new doors for the busy actress. Roberts explained, “I think whenever any actor has a movie where it’s kind of mostly about them, of course more people want to meet with them and see what’s going on. A lot of people are loving the movie, which is good to hear and that makes people want to send me more scripts, I guess, or something like that.”
One film on the horizon for Roberts is Wild Child directed by Nick Moore. “It’s like totally opposite Nancy Drew so I’m really excited for it. It’s about a kind of out of control Malibu princess who gets shipped off to boarding school in England. She goes through a whole journey over there and it’s really funny. She gets shipped to boarding school because she doesn’t really listen to her dad and she kind of just does what she wants to do when she wants to do it. She’s very, like, sassy. And then she gets to boarding school and doesn’t want to abide by any of the rules, so it gets her into some trouble.”
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Nancy Drew hits theaters on June 15, 2007 and is rated PG for mild violence, thematic elements and brief language.
