Eric Roberts says his relationship with daughter Emma Roberts is ‘only complicated through outside eyes’

Eric Roberts shared rare comments about his relationship with daughter Emma Roberts in a new interview.

The actor opened up to Kara Mayer Robinson on the April 1 episode of her Really Famous podcast, admitting that although he was estranged from Emma in the past, their relationship is “only complicated through outside eyes.”

“Because they don’t get any of it,” he said of public interest in their dynamic. “So, they have their own take, whatever that is, and it’s not a straight line because they’re not really involved. So it’s just thoughts, possibilities, interests, fantasies, whatever it is. But it’s not a real relationship with the subjects, so how could it be anything but a thought?”

Eric, 69, welcomed Emma, now 35, with ex Kelly Cunningham in February 1991 — a time when, he admitted, he was “a car wreck.”

“Emotionally, I was a wash rag,” he told Robinson. “I was not to be depended on emotionally, whatsoever… but I take full responsibility for it.”

The Runaway Train actor went on to explain that his own troubled relationship with his father most likely affected his self-worth as a man and dad. He battled depression and drug addiction for many years, and soured relationships with Emma as well as his sister Julia Roberts, until he got sober in 1995 and made amends over the years.

With tears in his eyes, Eric reassured Robinson that bringing up his relationship with Emma didn’t bother him “at all” and that he’s “so proud of my daughter.”

He also shared the story of their first-ever meeting after her birth, explaining that newborn Emma was “screaming her head off” until he started singing “Happy Birthday” — a song he performed countless times while Cunningham was pregnant.

“And [Emma] stopped screaming and tried to find my face with her little blind eyes,” Eric recalled. “It was the most complete moment maybe I have ever had in my life — that something I did was recognized by a brand-new creature who had my DNA. And there she was. And she already knew me… It was magic. And I’ll always have that.”

He added of the moment, “We recognized each other in her first moments of life. It may be the most incredible thing I’ve ever been through.”

Eric also spoke about Emma in a 2024 appearance on the Inside of You podcast, admitting that he gained a new perspective on his “sadness” over the loss of that father-daughter relationship in recent years.

“I started accepting that about myself with the birth of my grandchildren,” said Eric, who is grandpa to Emma’s son Rhodes with her ex Garrett Hedlund and two other grandkids through his stepchildren with wife Eliza Roberts.

He admitted that welcoming his oldest granddaughter was eye-opening.

“She was first, and she was a girl, so very vulnerable to me,” he said. “And [she] took a liking to me at two, two-and-a-half, in a very strong way, and named my wife ‘Famma,’ and we’re all very close. So that, and she also looks like Emma. Same coloring. And so it reminds me of what I didn’t have.”

“[Parenting is] the hardest job to do well and the easiest job to get on the planet. It’s a hard job,” he told Robinson.

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The actor previously detailed fatherhood in his 2024 memoir Runaway Train: Or the Story of My Life So Far.

“I loved my little daughter with the strength of Hercules, despite my own weaknesses,” he wrote. “However, I couldn’t handle the realities of an infant coming into my life, and I couldn’t handle being a parent. I’m still not a father figure. Emma, on the other hand, certainly knows what that role is — now grown up and a mom herself. She’s that person to her first child, Rhodes.”

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