🔥 Trending Now: ‘Had a lot of Things I Needed to Overcome’ (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Julia Roberts tells PEOPLE she didn’t enter into her career “with much confidence”

• The After the Hunt actress notes, “This is not an industry to be in if you can’t take criticism or harshness or being embarrassed”

• Roberts says early challenges made her decide “who I wanted to be” as opposed to “the kind of career I wanted to have”

For nearly four decades, Julia Roberts has sparkled onscreen. She won an Oscar for her turn as an environmental activist in Erin Brockovich, becoming such a beloved star that her After the Hunt costar Andrew Garfield calls her a “national treasure.”

Still, in a new PEOPLE interview, Roberts reveals she faced early struggles in her career.

“I don’t think I entered into my career with much confidence,” says Roberts, 57, in a joint interview alongside Ayo Edebiri, who plays the student protégée to her professor in After the Hunt.

“I encountered early on, not a lot but a few critical people who were really cruel,” she adds, “and it was a really interesting challenge for me to decide the kind of person I wanted to strive to be.”

“So it was so much more about who I wanted to be as opposed to what kind of career I wanted to have,” she says. “And then I wanted to take the person that I wanted to build and put that person into these different situations of work life.”

Roberts explains that it was “more bumps than smooth sailing” for her between ages 15 to 25.

“Of course, even then, I would have shreds of gratitude. I would think, ‘Okay, there’s a reason why it has to be so hard,’ ” she recalls. “Now I look at it as some of the lessons that I’m the most grateful for because they proved my endurance to myself.”

Adds Roberts, “Being insecure, it can be crippling. So if someone embarrassed me, it stopped me. I was apoplectic, so learning to navigate that — because this is not an industry to be in if you can’t take criticism or harshness or being embarrassed.”

As a kid, she recalls staying up late one night to watch a trumpeter (she can’t recall his name) perform for talk-show host Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

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“Johnny calls him over to the chair,” she recalls. “He puts his instrument down and he starts to walk over and he trips and falls on the stage. And me, sitting in the safety of my own home, minding my own business, was … it might as well have happened to me. I felt it. What did I know? But I had a lot of things I needed to overcome for myself.”

Reflecting on a career spanning multiple genres and directors, the mom of three says her choices were often about “personal evolution and discovery.”

Pausing, she sweetly looks at Edebiri, 30, and says with her signature laugh, “Did I bring the mood down?”

“No,” says Edebiri, “it’s beautiful.”

After the Hunt is in select theaters Oct. 10, then everywhere Oct. 17.

For more on Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.

Read the original article on People