The entertainment industry is facing an existential crisis , with less content being produced and far fewer jobs for the taking . Fortunately, Eric Roberts got wise to this state of affairs well before anyone else did, even before we binged TV shows as a source of pride. “They now give you no time to rehearse and they pay you less,” says Roberts, who is best known for his live-wire films.
“You can’t sit around and wait for the big paycheck anymore.” As Roberts writes in his new memoir, ”Runaway Train: Or, the Story of My Life So Far” — out now — he leaned hard into this new normal years before everyone else was scrambling for scarce jobs. Roberts too feels that pinch, which is why he “says yes to everything.
” “We are often overdrawn, broke and scared. I know people who were in the cast of ‘Titanic’ [who] can’t pay their rent,” Roberts writes in his memoir. But Roberts has no use for fame anymore; he just wants to work.
In the book, which Roberts wrote with journalist and novelist Sam Kashner, he boasts of having 750 credits on his IMDb page. By the time he sat down for this interview in August, that credit list had ticked up to nearly 850. “I’m an actor, first and foremost,” he says.
“Everything else is secondary.” A standout among a generation of New York theater actors who transitioned into film in the 1970s, Roberts burst into public consciousness in Bob Fosse’s 1983 biopic “Star 80” as Paul Snider, the homicidal husband of P.