Wait, how many movies has Eric Roberts been in?

Artwork from some of Eric Roberts’ most recent movies

The focus point of our latest ongoing slumming actors section is one of the most prolific actors working right now: Eric Roberts. Known to some as the washed-up star of 80s movies such as The Pope of Greenwhich Village and Runaway Train, to others as the guy from The Dark Knight and The Expendables, or the bad-boy brother of Julia Roberts, or the father of Emma Roberts.

It’s safe to say Eric Roberts has had his ups and downs, but at this point he has managed to turn his downs into ups. After reading a new profile in Vanity Fair, we’re not even sure it’s fair to call Eric Roberts a slumming actor. Instead we see a man who’s embracing that his glory days are far behind him.

Some highlights from Eric Roberts’ Vanity Fair interview:

• In 2017 he worked on 74 films. For comparison, take a look at the filmography of an A-lister such as Leonardo DiCaprio and you’ll see at the most 3 films with him were released in a single year. Look again and you’ll see there’s occasional gap years where A-listers don’t release any movies.
• At this point Eric Roberts has 488 credits on his name on IMDB. A fair amount of these are appearances in TV shows, but this is still an insane amount of credits.
• Some of the recent titles Eric Roberts worked on are Stalked by My Doctor 3, The Immortal Wars (which appears to an Avenger: Infinity War knockoff), and Pups Alone: A Christmas Peril.
• Beyond appearing in television shows and film, he’s no stranger to appearing in music videos either. Some of the videos you might have seen him in are Bitch Better Have My Money for Rihanna, Mariah Carey’s We Belong Together, and 2004’s Mr Brightside for The Killers.

Eric Roberts seems to be fine with this, as he says in the interview:

I start making a bunch of B movies—bam bam bam bam bam bam—one after the other, and then suddenly two, three years have passed, and I made like 30 films in two, three years. Now, in the past two years, I’ve made around 70 movies.
…
And so suddenly it’s like 250 movies, and I realize, I went from being a joke that’ll do anything to being ‘Is there anything he can’t do?’

For a man who used to struggle heavily with addiction, he seems to be quite content with his place in the world of film right now. Good on him, even thought we are hoping he will eventually show up again in something we actually want to see. (No offense, A Soldier’s Story 2: Return from the Dead).