Julia Roberts and Kaitlyn Dever got towed by a jet ski while making Ticket to Paradise
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Water sports are always a fun summer activity — but just imagine being towed by a jet ski on a raft next to Julia Roberts.
That's what happened to Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Dear Evan Hansen) while making Ticket to Paradise, in which she plays Lily, daughter of David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts).
When Lily decides to marry Gede (Maxime Bouttier) after meeting him on a trip to Bali, exes David and Georgia fly to the vacation paradise to try to prevent their daughter from making what they believe to be a horrible mistake.
Though set in Bali, they shot the film in Australia, but that didn't mean there wasn't a ton of time spent shooting on the ocean. "We were constantly on the ocean," Dever tells EW. "I remember one day we were out on the water, shooting on this tiny little boat, and then we had to go back to the beach to go to base camp, and they put me on a little flat raft that was being pulled by a jet ski. Julia Roberts was next to me holding on, riding this jet ski, and I'm like, 'What is my life right now?'"
Vince Valitutti/Universal Studios
Dever describes both Roberts and Clooney as "grounded, sweet, kind people," but that doesn't mean she wasn't incredibly stressed to play their daughter. "One of them is kind of crazy, but then two of them at once in the same movie and they're playing your parents is just mind-blowing," Dever gushes. "My nervousness on a scale of 1-10 was at like 11."
Indeed, Roberts and Clooney are so renowned for their chemistry and status as movie stars that writer-director Ol Parker was determined not to make Ticket to Paradise if they weren't his leads.
"If you're going to write about a divorced couple or make a film about a divorced couple, then you got to believe in the marriage that went before it," he explains. "There's just something about their shared history on and offscreen — we've had a sense of them together for years and years and years. So, when I first pitched the movie to Universal, I said, 'I want this to feel like the sequel to a movie that wasn't made,' and George and Julia bring that with them."
The warm welcome Dever received from the two movie stars extended to the rest of the cast, many of whom were Balinese and Indonesian locals who had never performed professionally before.
"It was fascinating to watch George and Julia work with people that have never acted before," says Parker. "Obviously you don't get to where they are without being very, very good at disarming people. Everyone they've met for the last 'X' years has been meeting George Clooney and Julia Roberts. They're very, very good at putting you at your ease, particularly with younger actors or terrified actors. But it was lovely to see them do it with even non-actors, to watch that dynamic of these two extraordinary pros working with rank amateurs."
Ticket to Paradise is now playing in theaters.
Additional reporting by Jess Leon.
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