Why Sandra Bullock wanted to play a part written for a man: “I just put out the feelers”
Throughout Hollywood history, there has always been a huge disparity between the kinds of roles written for men and women. In recent years, that balance has begun to be addressed in a significant way. Still, as recently as a decade ago, Sandra Bullock, one of the most prominent female stars of the last 30 years, was forced to ask for a male part to be rewritten as a woman in order to find something that got her creative juices flowing.
In 2013, Bullock rose to the top of the Hollywood pecking order again after a couple of rocky years between 2010 and 2012, in which her only release was the mawkish Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. With the double bill of The Heat and Gravity, though, Bullock displayed her enviable versatility yet again and solidified her box office dominance once more. However, in the wake of those significant successes, she found herself in something of a funk.
“About two-and-a-half years ago, I just put out the feelers saying, ‘I’m not reading anything I’m excited about,'” Bullock confessed to Entertainment Weekly in 2015. “‘Are there any male roles out there that they don’t mind switching to female, as long as it works?'”
Yes, that’s right: despite objectively being one of the biggest stars in the business, with a proven track record at the box office and an acting range many other stars would kill for, Bullock couldn’t find a single female role she was passionate about. That’s a damning indictment of the gender balance in Hollywood screenwriting at the time, but depressingly, it’s also not particularly surprising given how many female stars have pointed out the frustrating disparity over the years.
Thankfully, one of Bullock’s most recent co-stars was able to help her out of her predicament. George Clooney, who (briefly) appeared in Gravity, had been developing a comedy-drama based on the 2005 documentary Our Brand Is Crisis since 2007, but it had fallen into development hell. Peter Straughan had penned a script based on the doc, and it would have starred Clooney as a ruthless political campaign strategist from the notorious Greenberg Carville Shrum group, which heavily influenced the 2002 Bolivian presidential election campaign.
Naturally, Bullock’s participation would necessitate the main character being rewritten as a woman, but to Bullock’s delight, “George was all for it. He could see how it might work.” Straughan, too, wasn’t perturbed about rewriting his screenplay, and when Bullock read the results, she finally felt the elusive feeling she’d missed for a few years: excitement.
“You don’t get to read roles like this a lot,” Bullock gushed about ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine, an amalgamation of several real-life figures featured in the documentary. “For lack of a better description, she’s basically a female Karl Rove. But she’s just brilliant at the devious side of politics, of press, of PR, of what-have-you.” She grinned, “There’s a lot of unforgivable things that she does.”
Ultimately, Bullock’s gamble paid off in the sense that she received glowing reviews for her hilarious yet dangerous performance as Bodine. Critic Peter Debruge of Variety even called it “easily one of the best female roles of the last ten years,” while others waxed lyrical about how Bullock used her screen presence, dramatic range, and comic timing to create a character who would live long in the memory.
Unfortunately, the movie surrounding Bullock didn’t seem to impress anywhere as much, with most reviews claiming she was its sole redeeming feature. The film wound up going down in flames at the box office, and it would take another three years for Bullock to appear in a live-action movie again. Interestingly, Ocean’s 8, the all-female sequel to Clooney’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise, once again entailed her flipping a man’s role into a woman’s, perhaps proving that progress was still slow on addressing the gender gap.
