The Academy Award-winning movie Sandra Bullock forgot she signed up for
Having committed several commendable performances to the silver screen over the years, Sandra Bullock is well worthy of consideration as one of the best actors of her generation. With several acclaimed efforts in a wide variety of genres like Speed, A Time to Kill, Miss Congeniality and Gravity, Bullock has proven her quality and versatility time and time again.
Her career came to a head, though, with the 2009 sports drama film The Blind Side, written and directed by John Lee Hancock. Based on the 2006 Michael Lewis book of the same name, the film tells of a poor American football player who is helped to play in the National Football League with the help of his guardian.
Bullock played Michael Oher’s guardian, Leigh Anne, while Quinton Aaron starred as Oher. Bullock’s performance was so impressive that she was awarded the Oscar for ‘Best Actress’. Amazingly, though, Bullock had actually forgotten that she’d agreed to star in the film and had harboured serious doubts about taking it on.
“I don’t even remember saying yes to the movie,” Bullock once told The Irish Examiner of her mistake. “I kept turning it down, not because I didn’t like it, but because I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to make it the story that it deserves to be. I couldn’t bring to the role what it needed.”
Further reiterating her reason why she (thought she had) turned the film down and noting the difficulty of such a role, Bullock went on, “These are the kinds of roles that actresses can mess up, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t step into it! I didn’t know how to make it as good as the story.”
However, despite the regret of taking the film on, Bullock admitted to finding something within the story that helped her deliver a commendable performance, telling Female, “The inspiring part of it is that here’s this family that does this and didn’t do it because someone was writing an article or a book, or making a movie, but because that’s where the instinct said, ‘This is what we’re going to do: we’re going to give love and reach out a hand.’”
Still, the effort Bullock put in on The Blind Side paid off, and she was credited with an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’, a truly remarkable feat considering that she had at one point feared performing in the movie. The film serves as a reminder that even the projects we have the most doubts about can turn out to be some of our best work.
Check out the trailer for The Blind Side below.
