Why Sandra Bullock turned her back on the roles that made her a star: “I couldn’t care less”
Sandra Bullock is many things to many people. To some, she is an ordinary citizen forced to drive a bomb-laden bus in Speed. To others, she is the caring adoptive mother of a football star in The Blind Side, or a woman who gets cast out into deep space in Gravity. However you remember her, she is one of the biggest movie actors of recent times and there’s a reason why she keeps cropping up in so many different places.
For a period of her career, Bullock was defined by her roles in romance movies. She starred opposite Hugh Grant in Two Weeks Notice, flirted with Benjamin Bratt in Miss Congeniality, and fell in love with Bill Pullman after saving his brother’s life in While You Were Sleeping. Even in movies like Speed and Demolition Man, she was still the focus of the lead character’s romantic gaze.
However, by the time 2003 rolled around, she was done with that sort of thing. “Two Weeks Notice won’t be my last comedy, but it will be my last romantic comedy,” she told The Guardian. “There is nothing else in the genre that interests me. I feel like I got everything I wanted in this one.” She lambasted those who only saw her as an object of desire, explaining how hard it is for actors to escape typecasting. “I think you can totally get out if you don’t care about maintaining a lifestyle, or maintaining an image, if you’re prepared to take the necessary steps,” she said. “People are always going, ‘That’s not what people want to see you in’. I couldn’t care less. I’m the only one who can tell me what I’m not capable of doing. And then I’ll do it anyway.”
Following Two Weeks Notice, which was a financial success but a critical misfire, Bullock did begin to diversify her range. Her next movie was Crash, Paul Haggis’ grim portrayal of social warfare in Los Angeles. Over the next few years, she would appear in Loverboy, a family drama, Infamous, in which she played To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, and Premonition, a horror about a woman who has visions of her husband’s death. Not all of these were hits, but at least she was trying something new.
Of course, Bullock would not keep her word and did in fact return to the world of romcoms. In 2009, she appeared alongside Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal, one of her most popular movies. In the same year, she starred in and produced All About Steve, where Bradley Cooper played her love interest. Sadly, this wasn’t nearly as well received, appearing on multiple lists of the year’s worst movies.
Bullock explained that, whilst she didn’t feel worried about how she would be perceived on-screen, Hollywood’s constant spotlight on female beauty did start to take its toll. “I was paranoid and insecure to begin with,” she confessed. “That’s what success does I think. In each person it magnifies whatever was there to begin with. if you feel beautiful, if you feel insecure, whatever. People often say, ‘Oh that person became such an asshole, or such a bitch, once they became famous’. I’m like, uh-uh. That was there when they started, that was there all along.”
It’s a shame that Bullock felt pressured to leave romcoms behind because she’s very good in them. Luckily, she seems to have found a balance now where she can enjoy everything the movie industry has to offer, be it a serious melodrama or a silly ‘boy meets girl’ story.
