American Horror Story star Emma Roberts has claimed that her celebrity lineage has caused her to be rejected from jobs in the past.
Roberts, 33, is the daughter of The Dark Knight actor Eric Roberts, and the niece of Julia Roberts.
While Roberts has faced claims that she is a “nepo baby” – someone working in the entertainment industry who has benefitted from active or passive nepotism – she has suggested in a new interview that the Roberts name actually hindered her career.
“I’ve lost more jobs than I’ve gained from being in the business,” she told Flaunt magazine. “People have opinions and sometimes maybe they’re not good opinions of people in your family. I’ve never gotten a job because of it, I know I definitely have lost a couple of jobs because of it.”
Roberts also alluded to a 2022 issue of New York magazine, which featured an image superimposing the faces of several celebrity “nepo babies” onto actual babies. She herself was not featured in the picture.
“Should I be offended?” she said. “It was a cheap shot to put all the celebrity kids on the cover of a magazine on babies’ bodies. It’s like maybe the ‘Nepo Baby’ conversation would’ve been a more interesting article written intelligently in Vanity Fair with nuance, but instead, it was kind of this viral hating-on-people thing.”
Roberts also recently opened up on the box office failure of the 2024 superhero film Madame Web, in which she starred alongside Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, and Adam Scott.
Speaking to Variety, Roberts named “internet culture” as one of the reasons for the critically panned film’s underperformance.
“I personally really loved Madame Web. I really enjoyed the movie. I thought everyone in it was great,” she said. “The director, SJ Clarkson, I think did an amazing job. She’s the reason I wanted to do that movie. If it wasn’t for internet culture and everything being made into a joke, I think that the reception would’ve been different.”
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“And that’s what bums me out about a lot of stuff, even stuff that I’ve done, is people just make such a joke out of everything now,” she continued.
In Madame Web Roberts played Mary Parker, the mother of Spider-Man/Peter Parker, who is seen briefly in the film as a newborn baby but not named.