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Julia Roberts and Keifer Sutherland have gone on to have their own explosive careers and their own private relationships in the past two decades. However, in the early ’90s, they were an A-list Hollywood couple planning their massive wedding.

At age 23, Roberts already had Pretty Woman, Steel Magnolias, and Sleeping With the Enemy under her belt. She had also been swept off of her feet by the 24 star.

The Flatliners co-stars were preparing for a June 14, 1991 wedding that the world was anticipating. However, just three days before the big day. Roberts became a real-life runaway bride, running off with Sutherland’s best friend, Jason Patric.

Actor Kiefer Sutherland and actress Julia Roberts attend the 'Flatliners' together at the Flatliners premiere
Kiefer Sutherland and actress Julia Roberts | Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts were engaged to be married in the ’90s

The actors had fallen in love with the set of the 1990 film Flatliners, and they got swept away from there. Roberts even broke off her engagement to her Steel Magnolias co-star Dylan McDermott to be with Sutherland. The Stand By Me actor was also still married to his first wife, Camelia Kath, and their divorce did not become final until 1990.

Roberts even thanked Sutherland during her Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe speech for Steel Magnolias. She thanked her “best friend — my beautiful blue-eyed, green-eyed best friend, who gives me everything.” However, the relationship was messy chaotic, and full of drama since the couple was in their early 20s.

Sutherland was rumored to be keeping the company of a 24-year-old go-go dancer named Amanda Rice. However, the pair press forward with their engagement.

Julia Roberts ran off with Kiefer Sutherland’s best friend, Jason Patric three days before her wedding

Though they’d already had failed relationships under their belt, they were set to say, “I do” in front of 150 guests. However, three days before the wedding, Roberts called everything off.

“It was going to be the fantasy wedding of the decade,” People reported at the time. “Julia’s “custom-made gown,” a “two-piece number” reported to cost $8,000, hung unclaimed at the Tyler Trafficante West Hollywood salon.”

On the day of the canceled wedding, Sutherland moved out of Roberts’s house. Meanwhile, the Eat Pray Love star was hanging out with Sutherland’s The Lost Boys co-star, Jason Patric in Ireland.

 “When I get hold of Jason I am going to tear him limb from limb,” Sutherland was rumored to have said at the time via The Standard. “That snake pretended to be my best friend and all the time he was really after my girl.”

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Kiefer Sutherland revealed how he forgave Jason Patric after the Julia Roberts love triangle

From the moment they were spotted in Ireland, Patric and Roberts engaged in a quick romance that crash and burned almost as quickly as it started. In 2006, Sutherland reflected back on the time. “I commend Julia for seeing how young and silly we were, even at the last minute, even as painful and as difficult as it was,” he told Rolling Stone. ‘Thank God she saw it.”

As far as Sutherland and Patric’s relationship went, in 2012 they starred together in the Broadway show, That Championship Season. The pair reconciled in the early 2000s.

“The truth where I’m coming from: you fall in love, you fall in love,” Sutherland said on the podcast Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum. “There’s nothing you can do about that. [Julia’s] an extraordinary person, and he is too. Timing is what it is, and everyone moves on from that.”

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