Notting Hill, the 1999 film about a famous American actress who falls for a humble British bookstore owner, was one of the biggest hits of that year, earning $364 million at the box office and cementing Julia Roberts‘ reputation as queen of the ’90s rom-com. But, as she revealed in a new interview with Deadline, when she first heard about the film from her agent, Roberts was underwhelmed: “I thought, ‘Well, that sounds like the dumbest idea of any movie I could ever do. I’m going to play the world’s biggest movie star and I do what? And then what happens? This sounds so f****** stupid.'”

Though she found the script “so charming” and “so funny,” when she went out to lunch with director Roger Michell and screenwriter Richard Curtis, she still planned to tell the film’s creators that “No, this isn’t going to work. I’m passing on this movie.” But they won her over during the meal:  “they were just so charming and sweet and funny. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is really going to happen.'”

Elsewhere in the interview, Roberts weighed in on 1990’s Pretty Woman, the film that launched her into superstardom. Even if she was the right age right now, she said, she wouldn’t tackle the role of Vivian Ward, the sex worker with a heart of gold who finds love with businessman Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). “I have too many years of the weight of the world inside of me now that I wouldn’t be able to kind of levitate in a movie like that, right?” said Roberts. “I mean, not weight of the world, like, negative, but just all the things that we learn, all the things that we put in our pockets along the lane. It would be impossible to play someone who was really innocent, in a way. I mean, it’s a funny thing to say about a hooker, but I do think that there was an innocence to her, a kind of … I guess it’s just being young.”