After 30 years, Kiefer Sutherland and Lost Boys co-star Jason Patric have united to set the record straight about their past love triangle with mutual ex Julia Roberts.
In 1991, the actress, then 23, was practically a real-life Runaway Bride. On June 14 of that year, she was supposed to marry then-24-year-old Sutherland, her co-star in the 1990 film Flatliners. The two were set to exchange vows on a Twentieth Century Fox sound stage, decorated to look like a pastoral garden, in front of about 150 guests.
Instead, on the day of the wedding, the groom-to-be was spotted moving out of the Hollywood Hills home he shared with Roberts, while she was seen on a lunch date with Patric, also 24, and later jetting off to Dublin, Ireland with him, People had reported at the time. It turned out that Sutherland and Roberts had recently split, so the wedding had been canceled. Patric, now 54, and Roberts, 53, ended their own romance a year later.
Sutherland, 54, and Patric recently appeared together on Smallville alum Michael Rosenbaum's podcast Inside of You and jointly commented on the love triangle, one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the '90s. All three actors had previously spoken about the love triangle in separate interviews in past years, but this marked their first joint conversation on the drama.
Patric and Sutherland have previously reunited since the Roberts drama and have even worked together again. In 2011, they starred together in a Broadway revival of the play That Championship Season. In 2019, they reunited along with fellow Lost Boys alum Corey Feldman at a fan convention.
"Supposedly, you had a thing with Julia Roberts. You took off to somewhere. Where'd you go?" Michael asked Patric on the episode, released on Wednesday, April 27.
"Well, I mean, that was all, that was all the press, I mean, the fact was-" Patric began, before Sutherland cut him off and whispered, "Ireland."
"Yeah," Patric said, "I went to Ireland."
In 2011, Patric told Vulture, when asked about the reports about the two actors and Julia, "They had a relationship that ended and I was with her for a little while and it ended. They've both been subsequently married several times and I think they're fine. But we never had any issue, even back then."
On Inside of You, Sutherland said that post-breakup marked "a difficult time" for him, adding, "But look honestly, the truth, where I'm coming from, you fall in love, you fall in love, there's nothing you can do about that. She's an extraordinary person and he is too and timing is what it is and everybody moves on from that."
In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Kiefer was asked if he has forgiven Patric. He was quoted as responding, "It's not a matter of that. We were friends, and I'm surprised that I never got a call from him saying I've fallen in love with da-da-da. Instead, I found out from a stranger."
Roberts has spoken about scandal before as well. In 1994, she told Rolling Stone that the wedding was not canceled at the last minute, despite what was reported by some outlets. She said Sutherland "wasn't waiting at the altar, it wasn't the day before, somebody else didn't tell him, he didn't see it on TV."
She also was asked about recent comments Patric had allegedly made about bringing attention and trouble on herself. "When I read that," she told the magazine, "it really hurt my feelings."
In 2016, Sutherland talked to People about his and Roberts' breakup and wedding cancellation and said she was courageous.
"We were both young, and we were both very much in love, we had decided that we wanted to get married, but then this other thing kind of took over," he said. "She was arguably the most famous woman in the world, and this wedding that was supposed to be something between the two of us, became something so big."
He continued, "And then in the middle of that, I think she had courage. It wasn't what she wanted to do, in the end. And I think it took a lot of courage, in amongst all of that other stuff, to be able to say, 'I can't do this.'"