Julia Roberts Reveals ‘Pretty Woman’ Had Dark Ending in Original Script: ‘Thank God It Fell Apart’

Quite the heavy conclusion! Julia Roberts‘ iconic film Pretty Woman was a huge success, but things may have turned out different had the folks in charge gone with the original script’s ending.

The 51-year-old recently sat down with fellow actress Patricia Arquette for Variety‘s Actors on Actors series and discussed the 1990 film. “So many, many, many years ago, one of my early auditions was for a movie called 3,000. Most people don’t know that 3,000 was the original Pretty Woman script. And the ending was really heavy,” Patricia, also 51, said to start the interview.

The Eric Brockovich star goes on to recall that the original take ended with her character being thrown “out of the car,” before the driver “threw the money on top of her, as memory serves, and just drove away, leaving her in some dirty alley.”

Julia continued and admitted that she “had no business being in a movie like that.” But that version of the film never came to fruition, because the “small movie company” behind the script “folded over the weekend.“ “And by Monday, I didn’t have a job,” the A-lister said.

Eventually, the script landed with Disney, who decided to go forth with the picture. “I thought, ‘Went to Disney? Are they going to animate it?’” the mother-of-three recalled. “[Director] Garry Marshall came on, and because he’s a great human being, he felt it would only be fair to meet me, since I had this job for three days and lost it. And they changed the whole thing. And it became more something that is in my wheelhouse.”

“I couldn’t do it then. I couldn’t do it now,” Julia said of the 3,000 script. “Thank God it fell apart.” Pretty Woman also starred Richard Gere — and while it has been almost 30 years since the movie’s release, the 69-year-old feels bad that it still plays on television.

“When they tell me this I apologize because I take up so much of their time,” the actor once told Us Weekly.

So, are you about to watch it now?