• Julia Roberts explains why she was so attracted to her character in After the Hunt.
• The movie is the latest from director Luca Guadagnino, who explains why he wanted to bring these characters to life.
• Roberts' costar Ayo Edebiri talks about their intense face-off.

Julia Roberts is no stranger to drama.

Among her more than 50 movie credits are her Oscar-winning performance in Erin Brockovich, nominated roles in Steel Magnolias and August: Osage Countyand the thrillers Leave the World Behind, The Pelican Briefand Conspiracy Theory.

But in her new movie, Luca Guadagnino's After the Huntwhere she plays Alma Imhoff — a philosophy professor at a private university gunning for tenure, who gets caught in the middle of a sexual assault claim by Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a star student, against fellow professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) — she got the opportunity to play in areas she hasn't really had the chance to before.

"Her steeliness, her prickliness, her icy exterior and what that was about and what it was hiding and protecting, is what initially made me go, Hmm, this is interesting," she tells Entertainment Weeklysitting alongside Edebiri, Garfield, and Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays her husband. "And then once Luca came into the mix, then it just gets more and more intriguing and delicious to peel back that onion with him."

Intimate relationships are at the heart of Guadagnino's movies: that love triangle in Challengers; the coming-of-age exploration of sex between a 17-year-old (Timothée Chalamet) and his dad's 24-year-old grad student assistant (Armie Hammer) in Call Me By Your Name; an American ex-pat (Daniel Craig) who becomes obsessed with a younger man in Queer; two young cannibals (Chalamet, Taylor Russell) who fall in love on a road trip, in Bones and All; among others.

All complicated and layered, they're all also very different from each other. Guadagnino says he uses a combination of "gut feelings" and "familiarity that I might want to go away from, or I want to be close to" to choose his projects.

"Whether it's a novel or it's a script from someone, or a conversation that is sparking the possibility of a movie, what I am very interested in is always the character and the infrastructure," he explains. When it came to the After the Hunt script from first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, "I was immediately brought into the world, and I wanted to know more about these people, and I wanted to bring them to life."

Fortunately, one of the biggest movie stars in the world was immediately interested, too.

"Julia Roberts is one of the great icons, a mega movie star. She belongs to cinema. She is cinema. So she can do whatever she wants," he says. "So when I got the privilege of sitting with her on a couch and talking about this, and we started to feel compelled to explore this together, that was amazing. ... She's so fierce and she's so self-assured. She's really an artist that wants to create the mold for her art."

That fierceness came in handy for Alma, who has to confront her own past — and eventually confront both Maggie and Hank as she struggles to figure out what, if anything, really happened between them. At one point, things get physical between the women when Alma gets in Maggie's face.

"We had some tough stuff to do together," Edebiri says, Roberts looking on as she answers, "but I felt very safe to be able to go to those places with you."

"We love each other so much and we have such a symbiosis, this alchemy that creates the bedrock where you can kind of then do anything," Roberts interjects. "We all had scenes that at one point or another were like, God, how are we gonna navigate this? But we had this interesting, cemented foundation."

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Part of the navigation was of the "truth and untruths," as Roberts puts it, of Maggie's and Hank's stories, and how her adoring husband, a psychiatrist, challenges her to question her longtime friend and colleague, as well as Maggie's motives.

Even Edebiri isn't sure how she'd handle Maggie if she came across her.

"Maggie is like really deliberate about everything, which I feel like is also kind of a reflection of Luca's intentionality," the Bear star says. "That was how it felt on set. Everything from the art on the walls to what you're doing with your hands in a scene, he's conscious of and in conversation with.... If I were to meet her, I would be like, Ah, curious...curious individual," she says, laughing.

After the Hunt is in theaters now.