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By Deb Nathan
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Sandra Bullock
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How can you be an ordinary, nice person and a movie star at the same time? It's a persistent contradiction that Sandra Bullock contends with on a daily basis. Hollywood actors are expected to wander the earth, whether they're working or not, dragging their on-screen personas in tow, like pesky younger siblings they can't shake. Consider the outcry when Bullock walked into a neighborhood Saks Fifth Avenue, looking less then presentable.
"I read that you went into Saks and you looked like shit!" exclaimed one of her peers. "And that you had dog hair all over you!"
"I had just come from gardening," a flummoxed Bullock defends herself. "I had some dirt on me. My dog was in the car. I guess I leaned on him. You know, I moved to Texas so I wouldn't be smothered, so I could go places by myself, without the studio people watching over me."
But none of this should come as a surprise. Bullock has never fit the Grace Kelly cut of Hollywood glamour. Whether playing a beleaguered, reluctant heroine in Speed, a humiliated mother in Hope Floats or a daffy cop in Demolition Man, she has infused her roles with a shy, "if you're gonna do a close-up, do it from over there" familiarity that earned the clinging phrase: The Girl Next Door.
It may be a trite Hollywood label. Even Betty Thomas, the director of her latest film 28 Days, wanted to exploit that image to attract audiences to a movie with potentially unpleasant subject matter. But it's one she has, in a sense, earned. She's inherently approachable, deftly erasing the professional distance most actors maintain. For instance, she actually seems to enjoy giving interviews, where most movie stars would rather have their hands cut off. She bounds into the room with more energy than the rest of us combined (perhaps more energy than we think anybody has a right to have), grabs some refreshment, and claps her hands, "All right! Let's have some good, original questions. Let's go!"
Her filmography has been decidedly rocky over the years. After Speed planted her on the A-list, there was While You Were Sleeping, a romantic comedy you could take or leave. Two if by Sea featured a severely flawed script from an equally flawed Denis Leary. The Net was a thriller that wasted a promising and timely idea. Speed 2 produced an indisputable stench, and Practical Magic was promising comedy undermined by a murder plot that went nowhere.
Her choice of roles often reflected her own approach to life. She likes to search for that explosive mix of comedy and drama, which she feels is the most realistic and moving brand of theater. She shows very little interest in Merchant/Ivory waistcoats or Joy Luck Club weep-a-thons.
"I think the only way to deal with tragedy and death is with humor and a sense of irony," she says. "I meet so many people with no sense of humor, and I'm like 'You're going to be dead in a year.' I knew this stockbroker. I was a total clown around him, and I could never get him to budge. He had bleeding ulcers and a colostomy bag at the age of 24."
This philosophy was most evinced by Bullock in her 1998 film Hope Floats. While generally viewed as a medicinal melodrama, it contained some genuinely adult moments. And now it seems she's striving to achieve that same balance with 28 Days, a comedy about a charismatic and utterly unreliable party girl who winds up in rehab. The obvious questions come up. Is it too serious for her? Will the public pay eight bucks to see Sandra Bullock find herself?
"There's enough humor in it," she says. "There's no acceptance factor that I'm worried about. I'm not a serial killer or anything. I've had enough films not do well but every film is the one I needed to do. If you have the entertainment value that people come to see and the poignancy of subject that's not easy to talk about, what more do you need?"
Bullock spent four days at a rehab with Betty Thomas, staying around the corner, since she wasn't allowed to sleep at the establishment. But during the waking hours, she hung out with patients and listened to them air their demons.
"This stuff isn't easy for anyone to talk about," she says, "because then we have to ask what is it about ourselves that is lost or broken. We all have cracks in the armor that we try to paste over with money and clothes. We all think we have to be perfect creatures and we all think we have to be what the media throws out. People see a magazine and say, 'Oh, I need to be like Sandra Bullock.' Well, Sandra will tell you that the picture was airbrushed. It's not the human being: It's a product, a box of Tide."
Some patients refused to be in the same room with Bullock because they had no desire to let Hollywood use their lives as dramatic fodder.
"These people are there to spill, to weep and yell about everything in their life," she says. "Sexual abuse, drug abuse, physical abuse. And then here comes an actress bouncing in who's just there to do research. It's a violation and they have every right to be uncomfortable. I told them what my life was about. And some of them were like, 'We didn't want you in here at first. We thought you were "little shiny, happy person." And now we realize you're not so different.' And then afterwards, people were asking me if I was afraid they would call the tabloids and tell them I'm in there. What, are you kidding me? I had to pledge my confidentiality to them."
When she was first approached with the script, she was instantly wary, fearful of the Hollywood tendency to gloss over a potentially dark subject.
"I wasn't sure if the studio wanted to make it more commercial and likable," she says. "Here was a great subject. Some of the stories I heard at rehab, you wouldn't believe them if you put them on film. If you diminish the great heavy moments, it hurts the film. I didn't want to do it without the participation that was appropriate. I didn't want it to be soft."
And did Bullock come away with any revelations of her own?
"In that environment, you learn how dishonest with yourself you are every minute of the day," she says. "And how you try to make yourself OK by patch-working. It's a sanctuary. Where I was, there were no rock stars, no ballplayers. I think rehab has become glamorized, because nobody wants to read about normal people. We tend to be numb to the things around us. Wherever I am, whether I'm just driving around or visiting a country I've never been to before, I try to make myself wake up."
Bullock lapses back into her joking mood as she cites American Beauty as an inspiration.
"Now every time I see a plastic bag floating around, I'm like, 'Aw, isn't that sweet? ' " ©v
