What’s the one rule of the romantic comedy genre? That’s right: if they hate each other on their first meeting, they will undoubtedly end up falling in love.

It’s a well-worn narrative arc that, by the 1990s, was already becoming something of a cliche. As Hollywood’s token “American Sweetheart” at the time, Julia Roberts was all-too-familiar with such plotlines.

But it wasn’t the plot of 1994’s I Love Trouble that made Roberts feel so uneasy, it was her co-star, Nick Nolte.

By the dawn of the 1990s, Julia Roberts was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actors. After receiving an Acadamy Award nomination for her appearance in Steel Magnolias, she was cast in some of the biggest productions in Hollywood, including Pretty Woman and Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners – both released in 1990.

She would go on to star in 1993’s The Pelican Brief opposite Denzel Washinton before taking roles in a string of badly recieved productions. The most haunting of these, in Roberts’ opinion at least, was the 1994 romantic-thriller I Love Trouble.

Roberts stars as bright young thing Sabrina Peterson, an ambitious reporter working for the rival newspaper of Peter Brackett – played by Nick Nolte.

When the two reporters are assigned to cover the same train derailment story, they immediately take a disliking to one another, with Peterson assuring Brackett that he doesn’t have a hope in hell of “scoring”, to which Brackett replies with the frankly awful quip: “Where did you say you were from again, Bitchville?”

Only when they find themselves caught up in a dangerous government scandal does love begin to bloom. In Hollywood, machine gun fire is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Pulling off mutual affection must have required every ounce of acting skill Roberts and Nolte could muster because, as it turns out, they took an immediate disliking to one another on set.

It wasn’t long before the press caught wind of the feud, at which point Roberts’ PR team set about limiting the damage to her regal reputation. The actor didn’t make things any better by lashing out at Nolte during interviews.

Take, for example, the comments she made in a 1993 interview with The New York Times. “From the moment I met him we sort of gave each other a hard time and naturally we get on each other’s nerves,” she began.

“[While he can be] completely charming and very nice, he’s also completely disgusting. He’s going to hate me for saying this, but he seems go out of his way to repel people. He’s a kick.”