'Sleeping With the Enemy' at 30: Julia Roberts's co-star Patrick Bergin talks menacing performance in the hit '90s thriller
Ethan Alter
Due respect to Richard Gere and George Clooney, but Patrick Bergin is arguably Julia Roberts’s most memorable leading man. The Irish actor starred opposite the Oscar-winning actress in
Sleeping With the Enemy, which premiered in theaters thirty years ago this month. At the time, Roberts had just catapulted from rising star to superstardom thanks to
Pretty Woman, which became the second-highest grossing movie of 1990 just behind
Sleeping With the Enemy couldn’t have been more different from Garry Marshall’s blockbuster rom-com: Instead of Roberts and Gere’s fairy-tale romance, the film set the modern-day standard for “marriage from hell” thrillers. Released on Feb. 8, 1991, the movie grossed over $100 million in the U.S. alone, and its success inspired a wave of imitators, including almost every Lifetime original movie ever made. “It was a breakthrough movie in many ways,” Bergin tells Yahoo Entertainment from his home in Ireland. “I think you could call it a classic thriller for sure.”