Business & Finance Clulb - Celebrities : Julia Roberts isn't planning a spiritual journey of her own after making the film based on the hit travel memoir Eat Pray Love.

Roberts, a happily married mother of three, said she read and enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert's best-seller long before the proposed movie script came across her desk and she jumped at the role. But she added she isn't looking to make any big alterations in her own life. "No, no changes," Roberts said recently in Tokyo, where she was promoting the movie's release. "I'm good."

Roberts is a practising Hindu and said she was interested in the faith before she came across the book and did not convert because of it. The 42-year-old Georgia native was raised Catholic. Beyond those comments, she said she would keep her beliefs to herself. "I've realised something my mother told me 22 years ago," she said. "You're an actor, act. Don't talk about politics or religion."

One departure for Roberts does lie ahead. The Oscar winner has done little TV work, but she is now a producer of a documentary series called Extraordinary Moms to debut in January 2011 on Oprah Winfrey's new cable network. Her next big-screen project is Larry Crowne, with Tom Hanks set for release next year.

On her longevity as a sought-after actress, she said her inspiration has never waned. "Loving what you do is the secret to everything," she said. "I really do love the creative part of making movies."

Roberts also admits she bit off more than she could chew when filming Eat Pray Love, her new movie directed by Ryan Murphy about a woman who indulges her taste buds during a year-long journey of self-discovery. The famously slender Roberts admits she piled on five kilos during shooting for the Italian segment of the story, where her character munches her way through an endless array of dishes during a quest for nourishment. "We went to the place where Liz had pizza, got there at eight in the morning and proceeded to shoot, and I started my day with eight entire slices of pizza in 45 minutes," Roberts said.

"The deliciousness of something wears a tiny bit after piece seven. I would eat an entire slice in a take. I don't know why I thought that was a good idea," Roberts said. "But I loved every kilo, and everyone said it was going to drop right off in India, and that didn't happen. I didn't get that memo."

Twenty years after rocketing to global superstardom in 1990's smash hit Pretty Woman, Roberts, 42, remains one of Hollywood's elite acting talents, a star who regularly ranks among the world's highest paid celebrities and is in complete control of her career. Roberts said she was drawn to Eat Pray Love soon after Gilbert's memoir was published in 2006. "I read it before it became so widely popular, and I thought it was so terrific 30 pages into it, that I went on Amazon.com and sent one to my best friend in Chicago, and said, ‘Let's read this'," she said.

Roberts, who has been happily married to cameraman Daniel Moder since 2002, with whom she has three children, said she could relate to Gilbert's quest for happiness even if she had allowed her life to unfold at its own pace. Asked if she had tried to evolve her life like Gilbert, Roberts replied: "Not in the urgent pursuit way that she's experiencing it, but I definitely knew that my life would continue to evolve until I found that place to occupy and live in, which is the home I have now."

Although Roberts met Gilbert during filming in Rome, the actress said she was careful not to allow that to shape her performance. "I met her in Rome. I didn't want to meet her before that, because I knew that she and Ryan [Murphy] were in close communication, and I obviously, in this endeavour, the first step I took was to put my complete and total trust in Ryan," Roberts recalled.

Roberts is backed by an impressive stable of co-stars in Eat Pray Love including James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Billy Crudup, Viola Davis and Spanish Oscar-winner Javier Bardem. Roberts admits that she was initially nervous about working with Bardem, who plays her love interest in the film, following the Spanish heartthrob's chilling Oscar-winning performance in 2007's No Country for Old Men. Her fears proved to be ill-founded.

"I was a little terrified to be around him after No Country For Old Men. I said to him near the end of filming, ‘You know, I thought you'd be so intense and weird, and I'd have to be like, handling you, but you're just so sweet and funny, and it's just so easy!' And he said, ‘I'm not like that normally. I just wanted to try it once to see how it worked!'"

Bardem's energy ultimately proved to be infectious, Roberts recalled. "It was like deciding to get a puppy. You have everything in your house worked out, and then the puppy comes in, and you're like, I'm way too tired to have a puppy," she said.