Behind the Scenes The Starlet—Sandra Bullock
Hollywood’s girl next door is now our girl next door.
SANDRA BULLOCK SAYS SHE WILL pick me up for lunch, which is the first sign that this is not going to be a normal celebrity interview. The second sign is that she’s on time: At eleven she pulls up to the front door of Austin’s Four Seasons Hotel—exactly when she had promised to be there. “I thought movie stars were always late for appointments with reporters,” I say as I climb into her black Ford Expedition. Wearing a slightly wrinkled white T-shirt, tennis shoes without socks, green tie-up pants that look like pajama bottoms, and clunky brown glasses, Bullock flashes me a gleaming grin, her teeth as white as milk, and says, “Hey, I’m trying to be different.”
She’s not kidding. Since rocketing to fame four years ago with her frolicsome, daisy-fresh performances in such box-office hits as Speed and While You Were Sleeping, Bullock has been Hollywood’s number one “cute” girl, an actress who attracts legions of fans to her movies just because she’s adorable. But late last year, the 33-year-old rented out her glamorous 1936 Spanish-style stucco home in the Hollywood Hills and began the process of moving to Austin. Although she is still only a part-time resident—she flies in mostly on weekends and stays in a hotel or with friends—she has started building a three-bedroom stone house on a six-acre tract on the shores of a Texas lake (for privacy reasons, she’d rather not say which Texas lake). “A lot of people in the industry are baffled that I would just pick up and leave L.A.,” says Bullock, who spent her childhood shuttling between Europe (where her German-born mother performed as an opera singer) and Arlington, Virginia. “But I feel a lightness when I’m here. It’s the kind of place where I can feel normal again.”
Bullock has also gone to Texas, as the saying goes, to make a new mark professionally. Her latest film, Hope Floats, which opens this month, was shot in Smithville, a town of 3,500 outside Austin on the banks of the Colorado River. In the film—which is also set in Smithville—Bullock plays Birdee Calvert, a big-city photographer who learns by watching a TV talk show that her best friend is having an affair with her husband. Devastated, Birdee packs up her brilliant and sensitive young daughter (Mae Whitman) and moves back to her hometown to live with her eccentric mother (Gena Rowlands). Over time, she reexamines her relationship with both of them and also a childhood friend (Harry Connick, Jr.) who has carried a torch for her since their days together in high school.
Hope Floats is not going to be a blockbuster. There are no train crashes, no chase scenes, no buses speeding out of control. Yet it may have a blockbuster effect in terms of how moviegoers—and Hollywood moguls—view Bullock. “This film is a great step forward in Sandy’s acting career,” says Longview native Forest Whitaker, the director of Hope Floats and a respected actor in his own right. “You’re going to see her in very tense moments with her own child. You’re going to see her fall apart and be totally lost and then try to rebuild her life. You are going to see her display a depth of emotion that she’s never been allowed to show in her other roles.”
Which is another way of saying that Bullock is making a concerted effort to put “cute” behind her. “Sandy has gotten to the point where she feels that Hollywood has locked her into a sweet, bubbly image that represents only about a fifth of who she really is,” says Hope Floats producer Lynda Obst, who herself bought a home just outside Fredericksburg five years ago. “I know she wants to break out of that cocoon, to liberate herself, to reveal the depth and edge in her talent. And how does she do that? She gets out of the Hollywood maelstrom and comes to Texas.”
NOT THAT BULLOCK IS PLANNING TO DITCH the whole-wheat charm that made her famous. She couldn’t do that if she tried. As she presses on the accelerator and heads out of downtown Austin, she begins talking nonstop, barely taking a breath between sentences, her ponytail bouncing up and down with each nod of her head. She is, by turns, feisty, quirky, flirtatious, and always utterly disarming. At one point, while discussing the need to follow her instincts (“If you don’t, I think you get a sort of chemical imbalance in your body”), she suddenly exclaims, “Oh, my gosh, am I going right?” She quickly switches lanes, then starts giggling, then starts to put in a CD so that I can hear a certain song she likes, then interrupts herself again to talk more about following her instincts.
It’s rare to find an A-list actress who moves through life without an entourage or a publicist hovering nearby. But everyone who knows Bullock remarks on her complete lack of pretense. During shoots, she orders coffee for the crew and invites them to her parties (she briefly dated a grip she met while working on one film). She never attempts to look like a glamour puss and proudly vows never to get breast implants “because that’s not part of my personality.” Instead of the no-fat salads prepared by chefs on the set, she wolfs down peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches. “What makes her so appealing is that she is so open to life,” says Whitaker. “She doesn’t ever close herself off to the world the way other celebrities at her level do.”
Of course, she’s not entirely open. Although she has survived nearly a decade in Hollywood without the slightest taint of scandal—“If she has any skeleton in her closet, she probably put it there,” Dennis Leary, her co-star from Two if by Sea, told Details—she does keep certain parts of her life private. Perhaps the biggest mystery about Bullock is whether she is or is not dating Texas native and fellow A-lister Matthew McConaughey. After meeting on the set of A Time to Kill in 1995, they have spent quite a bit of time together: People magazine has reported that they celebrated one New Year’s Eve together in New Orleans, vacationed in Miami, and held hands at the premiere of Bullock’s movie In Love and War. Show-biz insiders speculate that she is moving to Texas to be closer to the actor, but Bullock insists that isn’t true. “He doesn’t even keep a place here,” she says, repeating the party line that she and McConaughey are just friends. “He is an exceptional person who can do anything as an actor, and yet he remains, deep down, the exact same person he’s always been. He carries a dip cup, plays golf, and still takes his mom everywhere.”
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