Who knows what the first movie I saw Eric Roberts in but Best of the Best was an institution growing up. Phillip and Simon Rhee’s 1989 love letter to Tae Kwon Do is an inspiring and emotional sports tale given credibility by James Earl Jones, Sally Kirkland and the one and only Eric Roberts. Roberts had already made a splash as an intense young actor in acclaimed fare like The Pope of Greenwich Village, Star 80 and Runaway Train where he garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Recently, Roberts was busy competing on Dancing With the Stars and promoting autobiography Runaway Train: or, The Story of My Life So Far. The book dives into his youth, issues with a cruel father and a mother who wanted to be a performer. I forgot he was big brother to Julia Roberts and there’s several segments focused on their relationship over the years. On the film side, Roberts and co-writer Sam Kashner focus mainly on the milestones with only a few lines about Best of the Best but how it made him a rock star in Russia. There are some admiring anecdotes about Slyvester Stallone from their time on 1994’s The Specialist where Stallone realized they didn’t have a scene together so Sly wrote it and they shot it the week after. The two reunited in 2010 on The Expendables.
Roberts chronicles his issues with substance abuse, rocky relationships and near death experience after totaling his car. Quite fascinating was his take on current work as he accepts most jobs which continues to take him around the world in productions big and small. One day he’s on Christopher Nolan’s London set for The Dark Knight, the next he’s in Ohio on a small western. The good ol’ days seemed to stop for him in the 90’s when he’d be well paid for a direct to video movie, get picked up by private car and be flown first class. These days some of his projects have him haggling with producers over where to park and accepting payment via Venmo!