Emma Roberts Is Ready to Stand on Her Own, Be a Movie Star, and Wear Less Clothes

From Cosmopolitan

All week, my Google Alert for Emma Roberts is in overdrive. “Emma Roberts Ditches Engagement Ring After Split From Longtime Love Evan Peters.” “Emma Roberts Mixes Prints.” “Emma Roberts Spotted With Actor Garrett Hedlund.” Emma goes brunette. Emma’s recovering from heartbreak. Emma’s moving on and simultaneously nailing all of spring’s best trends.

And then, Emma Roberts the person is standing in front of me at Skylight Books on the east side of Los Angeles. She is neither boldly mixing prints nor visibly removing an engagement ring.

“What do you like to read?” she asks, hands in the pockets of her slim Frame overalls, head tilted as she listens to my response. She takes off down the aisles, one gold ballet pump in front of the other. She tells me she just dropped off a book at her friend director Gia Coppola’s house that they want to develop for a film. For now, the project is a secret.

Emma’s next movie after the animated film UglyDolls, in theaters now, is one she can talk about: Netflix rom-com Holidate. She’ll play a woman who reminds her of the old-school rom-com characters practically invented by her aunt Julia Roberts (here, the younger Roberts does a spot-on impression of a scene from her favorite movie, My Best Friend’s Wedding, voicing the parts of both Rupert Everett and Julia). She loved the Holidate script, and the project went to the top of the list when she updated her vision board.

“What’s on your vision board right now?” I ask.

Emma thinks for a minute, then opens her phone and scrolls through photos. She has a floor-to-ceiling bulletin board in her house and finds the act of collaging and vision-boarding relaxing, a way to manifest good things. She finds a photo. “Should I show you this?” she wonders aloud. Then she turns her phone around to reveal a picture of an Alice Walker poem pinned to a pale-blue backdrop. Titled “When the End Comes,” the first two stanzas read:

In what seems like as good a time as ever to tread into Google Alert territory, I say, “I’ve been reading that you broke up with Evan. Is that true?”

Emma flicks her eyes—I wouldn’t say rolls them, exactly—and reboots. “I never want to talk about relationships I’m in or that are ending or have ended. It’s hard enough to be with someone by yourself, let alone with an audience. Growing up is hard. Sometimes it makes me sad that I can’t have a private moment.” She pauses. “Because of Twitter and Instagram, there’s a whole other element where everybody can comment on what you’re doing and no one knows the real story. That’s hard.”

“Do you want to set the record straight?”

“I think I know what’s true, and I know what happened in my own life and so do the people who love me and who I love.”

A question about whether she’s dating Garrett also politely goes without comment, so I ask a different one: What is it like for her when every paparazzi snap leads to public speculation about details of her private life? What does she do?

“I spend hours on the phone with my mom,” Emma replies immediately. “She puts everything into perspective. She’s never once judged me. I also have the most amazing group of friends. They come over and we lie in bed or talk, watch TV, or read short stories to each other. We open a bottle of wine. To me, that’s the best whenever anything is going on—to have everyone come over and be together.”

I say that the end of a relationship can be hard because you usually lose a best friend along with a romantic partner. “I think that no matter who you are or what you do or wherever in the world you are, anything ending is hard,” she replies. “Losing something is hard. And the only thing I can say for that is—” she pauses. “What can I say for that? I’m realizing that life is highs and lows. I’m trying to ride them out and live somewhere in the middle. When you’re low, you think it’s never going to end. When you’re high, you’re so scared of it ending. And I’ve lived in both of those places for too long.”

Emma has been thinking a lot about time. It’s felt different to her over these past few months, like something she can finally take ownership of and use however she wants. It’s partly due to a break in her filming schedules, but an accompanying shift in her personal life is also clear. “It’s been fun to really choose how I’m spending my time,” she says. (It occurs to me that so much of being in a relationship is waiting on someone else to eat dinner.) “I’ve had days where I’ve woken up and haven’t had to do anything other than what I want to do, and that’s been so fun. And something I’ve lost touch with over the years. To get to feel like time is mine is a really new thing for me.”

At Skylight, a woman tells Emma that she’d joined her book club, Belletrist. Emma notices R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries in the woman’s hand. “Oh!” she says happily. “That one is great!”

Emma prefers to keep attention on this part of her life: Belletrist (cofounded with BFF Karah Preiss), her eagerness to chat about authors, and her projects. She is currently filming The Hunt, then heads to Atlanta to shoot Holidate, and season 9 of American Horror Story, which she stars in, begins filming in June. Her former fiancé, the aforementioned “longtime love” Evan, happens to be taking the season off for the first time in eight years. Make of that what you will—some AHS stans are blaming Emma. But the only thing she’ll say about the show is that she’s excited to work for showrunner Ryan Murphy again.

The book club is where she gets to take charge. Emma launched Belletrist after noticing tons of interest in her own #CurrentlyReading posts. Two years later, she keeps the Instagram account filled with live readings, author interviews, and plenty of flat-lay photography featuring pretty book covers next to coffee and fruit.

“I feel like I tapped into something,” Emma says over an iced latte down the street from the bookstore. “As a teenager, I felt like if you liked to read, you were a nerd, and if you cared about shoes, you were a girly girl. I wanted to create a place where you could do both and be both. We’re living in a time when you can’t opt out of being smart. You have to pay attention. You have to read. You have to nourish your brain every way you can.”

After our bookstore date, I start reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which Emma bought for me. “It’s one of those books that puts you in a creative mind-set,” she told me. “You’ll want to go on an adventure.” I start thinking of her wiping the slate clean, making her own choices, when I get a new email.

Google Alert: “Emma Roberts Enjoys Romantic Stroll With Garrett Hedlund.”

Sounds like she’s off to a pretty good start.

Photographed by Ellen von Unwerth. Styled by Aya Kanai. Hair by David von Cannon at Starworks Artists using Oribe. Makeup by Hung Vanngo at The Wall Group using Dior Beauty. Manicure by Julie Kandalec using Dior Vernis. Props styled by Chelsea Maruskin for Art Department

On Emma: Chanel boots and necklace; Cosabella bra, Vanity Fair briefs (cover); Versace dress, Christian Louboutin heels, Jennifer Fisher earrings; Citizens of Humanity jeans, Chanel necklace (as belt), Christian Louboutin heels, Jennifer Fisher earrings; Louis Vuitton dress, earrings, and necklace; The Marc Jacobs cardigan and underwear, Ruslan Baginskiy hat, Marla Aaron necklace; Versace dress, Bulgari earrings; Giamba skirt, Cartier necklace; DKNY bra, Levi’s shorts, Converse sneakers, Cartier necklace

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