Just one of the guys! George Clooney is friends with some of Hollywood’s hottest leading men — among them Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. But his cutest pal by far is Sandra Bullock‘s 3-year-old son, Louis, who bonded with the actor on the set of Clooney and Bullock’s new drama, Gravity.
“My son thinks he’s a very cool dude,” single mom Bullock told reporters at a Toronto International Film Festival press conference for the movie on Monday, Sept. 9. “If there’s a choice between me [and] George and Alfonso [Cuaron, the director], my son will leave me to be with George and these guys. He’s a boy’s boy, so he has to go talk to the men.”
The Heat star, 49, who adopted Louis in 2010 — within months of her high-profile divorce from ex-husband Jesse James — said that her son actually seeks out male-bonding time with the A-lister. “The cute little anecdote is that he went to me and said, ‘Where’s George and Rande [Gerber]?'” she recalled. (Gerber, married to Cindy Crawford, is a close pal of Clooney’s.) “I said, ‘I don’t know!’ And he said, ‘I need them.’ So we went and found them, and they had man time. And I sort of stood off to the side and waited for them to finish. Then I was allowed to take him back.”
Bullock herself has been friends with Clooney for more than two decades, she noted. “George and I have known each other for over 20 years. We’ve known each other since we got out of college,” she said. “We have the same group of friends, so we’ve known each other since we had no work.”
Finding work is no longer a problem for either of them, of course, but some things never change. “George is the same exact person I knew then in all respects,” the Oscar winner (for 2009’s The Blind Side) insisted. The one difference? “He has better hair now,” she quipped. “He has less of it, which I appreciate.”
Another thing she appreciates? The currently single 52-year-old’s big heart. “He’s taken his blessed life and done amazing things with it,” Bullock said of her costar. “George is a good man, and I’m really proud to know him for this time and see the human being he’s become.”
