&34;She said: 'You just keep it. I don't want it,'&34; the actress recalled. Why Julia Roberts' daughter gave up her smartphone after watching Stand by Me

"She said: 'You just keep it. I don't want it,'" the actress recalled.

Why Julia Roberts' daughter gave up her smartphone after watching Stand by Me

"She said: 'You just keep it. I don't want it,'" the actress recalled.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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October 15, 2025 4:45 p.m. ET

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River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton in 'Stand by Me'; Julia Roberts in Paris on Feb. 28, 2025. Credit:

Columbia Pictures/Getty; Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty

- Julia Roberts' daughter Hazel Moder gave up her smartphone after watching *Stand by Me*.

- Moder voluntarily handed the *Pretty Woman* actress her phone after reflecting on the events of the movie.

- Roberts recalled Moder saying, "I just thought if those boys had phones, they wouldn't be talking to each other like that."

Julia Roberts' daughter decided to unplug after watching an '80s classic.

The *Pretty Woman* actress said that her daughter, Hazel Moder, was inspired to ditch her smartphone after an impactful viewing of Rob Reiner's seminal coming-of-age film *Stand by Me*.

"I think people don't realize how much they miss talking," Roberts said while discussing her new film *After the Hunt* with *The New York Times*. "For some reason, I was thinking this morning about when my kids were young and we showed them *Stand by Me*, and our daughter said to me, 'I'm going to give you my phone.' And I said, 'OK. What do you want me to do with it?'"

Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell in 'Stand by Me'.

Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett

Roberts explained Moder's sudden disinterest in her phone. "She said: 'You just keep it. I don't want it,'" the actress recalled. "'Seeing that movie, I just thought if those boys had phones, they wouldn't be talking to each other like that. They wouldn't have gone looking for that body, they wouldn't sit around the fire and share these stories.'"

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The *Duplicity* actress said that her daughter recognized how constant smartphone usage can inhibit organic social interaction. "She could see how it was getting in the way of things," Roberts said. "All that's to say, we love talking to each other and sometimes we forget how important it is."

The *My Best Friend's Wedding* star previously said that she and her husband, cinematographer Danny Moder, had established fairly strict parameters for their three kids' phone usage. "We just had sort of simple rules where we had a charging station, where everybody's phone goes when you get home," she told *Today* in 2023. "There's no phones at the table, certainly."

Hazel Moder and Danny Moder in Cannes, France on July 10, 2021.

P. Lehman/Future Publishing via Getty

Roberts also said that she is concerned about smartphone obsession in an interview with the U.K. outlet *The Times*. "Our brains are incapable of that influx," she said earlier this month. "Our eyeballs, brains, all that is too much, especially for little, sweet, soft mushy brains, that need to be filled instead with mud and fields."

*Stand by Me* starred Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell as a group of young friends who go in search of a dead body in Oregon in 1959. The film, which was based on Stephen King's novella *The Body*, also featured Kiefer Sutherland, who was briefly engaged to Roberts in 1991.

***Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.***

Directed by *Challengers* filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, *After the Hunt* also stars Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny. The film is now playing in theaters.

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