Sandra Bullock is recalling the not-so-glamorous start to her acting career.
During a recent chat with close friend Jennifer Aniston for Interview magazine, Bullock, 62, opened up about her acting comeback in Practical Magic 2, which comes four years after her roles in The Lost City and Bullet Train.
“Looking at these questions, it feels like you dropped out of making movies 30 years ago,” Aniston, 57, asked, to which Bullock replied, “I did, but I’m back.”
Aniston then asked Bullock whether she had made a “deliberate choice about the kind of career” she hoped to have, or if her idea of success simply “evolved” over time.
“I was in New York, I was a waitress, I was auditioning for every pervert that existed, asking me to drop my pants. I was like, ‘Nope, not the role for me,’” the Miss Congeniality actress recalled of the infamous culture within the entertainment industry. “I was working my way up. Every working actor thinks you will never work again so you just take what you can get and make the most of it.”
Bullock added that she only ever made an “intentional” choice regarding her career when she decided that she needed to branch out beyond the romantic comedy genre.
“I was getting so much s*** for them,” she continued. “And I took a role in this film called Crash.”
The crime drama film Crash, which premiered in 2004, starred Bullock as Jean Cabot, the wealthy wife of a Los Angeles district attorney whose worldview is shaken when the couple is carjacked at gunpoint by two Black teenagers. The movie, directed by Paul Haggis, explored complex racial and social tensions and won an Oscar for Best Picture. It also marked Bullock’s shift from rom-coms to more serious roles after starring in the classics While You Were Sleeping (1999), Two Weeks Notice (2002) and others.
“It was a genius film,” Bullock told Aniston of Crash. “I wanted to start flexing other muscles.”
Bullock admitted, however, that she misses the days when she primarily did comedies.
“I want to do nothing but that now,” she shared. “Some people want to bring sexy back. We’re going to bring the funny back.”
Bullock’s breakout role came in 1994, when she played Annie Porter in the action thriller Speed opposite Keanu Reeves. She went on to star in several box office hits, including Miss Congeniality (2000), The Blind Side (2009), The Proposal (2009) and Gravity (2013). Her role as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side earned Bullock her first and only Oscar win for Best Actress. (Bullock was later nominated for the award again for her role as Dr. Ryan Stone in Gravity.)
Though Practical Magic initially bombed at the box office upon its 1998 release, having grossed $68 million worldwide on an estimated budget of $75 million, the film later became a beloved cult classic.
“We thought, ‘This is going to be such an amazing film. People are going to love it.’ And then it got quiet. It got quiet,” Bullock recalled to Variety at the August 31 premiere of Practical Magic 2. “[They] were like, ‘How many women in a film do you need? How many tones do you need? What kind of film is this?’”
Practical Magic starred Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters Sally and Gillian, respectively, who must navigate their family’s generational curse dooming any man who falls in love with them to an untimely death. The pair reprised their roles in the sequel, which premiered in theaters on Thursday, September 10.
“It just happened,” Kidman, 59, told the outlet of the sequel. “It was more like serendipity, and it came, and we were ready, and everything fell into place. It’s like in life — you try to force things, it doesn’t work. You have to wait, be patient, and we [were] both kind of open to it.”
