Dressed in a diaphanous Helmut Lang blouse, burnished by her make-up artist, her slightly bumpy nose, broken in childhood, undetectable on a movie screen, Sandra Bullock enters the Knightsbridge hotel suite in heels that add maybe 4in to her 5ft 7in. She looks rather good for someone who believes she has turned up for her own execution. She hates interviews. “I feel like I am target practice for people.” I protest that I am only looking for her to say something interesting. “Don’t count on it,” she says. “I’m the queen of saying a lot and then really not having said much at all.”
This encounter, I realise, is going to be edgier than your typical Bullock movie, those rom-coms such as Miss Congeniality and While You Were Sleeping, in which a celibate shrew succumbs to the man who divines the beauty within. Not that Bullock lacks edge when she needs it: she was quietly disputatious as Harper Lee in Infamous, hysterically so as Jean the politician’s wife in Crash. But her new film The Proposal returns to romantic comedy, the genre that was the guarantor of her success after she retired from action movies but which she has avoided, to the detriment of box-office returns, since Two Weeks Notice in 2002. Taking her usual melt-that-hard-heart formula and mixing it with a dash of Green Card, a hint of Meet the Parents and a glimpse of Sandra stark Bullock naked, The Proposal has revived her career and taken more than £50 million in a fortnight in the States.
But what does that mean for her? Aged 44, can she now expect to play romantic leads for another ten years? “Like I care about that!” she scoffs. “I think it means that I and it will be added to the nice, small folder of films that prove: ‘Wow! Women can open films. So let’s write some more.’ But what I’ll do now is screw it up. I’ll do a series of films that have nothing to do with the success of this film and people will go: ‘See! She’s ruined it again.’ ”
She is not joking. This autumn a film she has also produced will be released called All About Steve, in which she plays a misfit crossword-puzzle addict. Then comes The Blind Side, a sociological American football movie in which she plays a real woman, “a suburban, Christian, Southern mother, blonde and bigger than life”.
The problem is that she disavowed rom-coms after Two Weeks Notice, declaring most of them neither romantic nor funny and starring uninspiring heroines. I wonder how in her mind The Proposal fixes the genre’s faults. Her initial response is to deny its rom-comliness. “I love comedy. I don’t like romantic comedy because in the end I couldn’t care less if she winds up with a guy.”
But since she always does, I say, at least this time the guy, Ryan Reynolds, is a dozen years her junior. The Proposal reproaches Hollywood sexism and ageism. This is not one of Bullock’s favoured talking points. “In the States people said: ‘What do you think of the age difference?’ I was like: ‘What? There’s no mention of it.’ ” Except, I say, when Betty White’s character, the granny, exclaims: “She’s no girl!” “And Betty White [who is 87] should be the only one allowed to say that.” Would it not have been more interesting to explore the gap? “We did explore it! The audience is smart enough. I’m older; Ryan’s younger. Betty White said it. How else do we have to say it?”
The issue is muddied, I argue, because she still plays young and sexy — “Well, you know, that’s good lighting” — and, I press on, that builds another implausibility into the plot. Outside of movies such as Two Weeks Notice and The Lake House (a time-travel piece that dodgily reunited her with Keanu Reeves, her co-star in Speed, the movie that made her name), are there really powerful women who look like Sandra Bullock with no love life? I mean, were there ever gaps in her life between boyfriends?
“Oh God yes! There were great amounts of time between my boyfriends, contrary to what the media like to say.”
I have read that these included the American footballer Troy Aikman, the musician Bob Schneider and her co-stars Matthew McConaughey and Ryan Gosling. “I’m one of those people who are very good at being alone and I was happy as a clam doing what I was doing,” she says. “All I wanted in my life was what I was doing at that time. Whether I was in a wonderful relationship or not, my priority was my work, my art, what I wanted to carve out for myself. When I wasn’t responsible for anyone else but me I had a wonderful, wonderful time. But there were those people going, ‘Aren’t you missing out?’ and you do stop for a second. And then you go: ‘I cannot believe they made me doubt myself.’”
She thanks her mother for “hounding” her to be unique: “Believe me, my mother was like, ‘Don’t marry. Have a career.’ ” Helga Meyer, a German opera singer, met John Bullock, of Bullock County, Alabama, in Europe after the war while he was studying opera. Their two daughters’ childhoods were split between Virginia, where he worked in business, and Nuremburg, where she based her career. Sandra’s childhood was, she says, “schizophrenic”, but healthy.
Mother Bullock did not live to see her daughter marry, although Bullock believes her spirit was present at Bullock’s wedding in 2005. But, then, who would have missed such an odd coupling? She was a Grade A star, a millionaire businesswoman from a family of sophisticates, he a tattooed motorbike freak named Jesse James, who had been left to bring himself up when his parents split when he was 13 and was to star in a stunt show called Jesse James is a Dead Man. They met when Bullock arranged for her godson to tour the set of James’s TV series, Monster Garage. Four years on they are happy, supportive of each other’s careers and childless.
We have arrived at another issue that doesn’t make it into her Top 100 faves. “It always seems when I’m at a press junket that people want to talk about my uterus. ‘I’m not talking about their vagina or their penis. Why are they talking about my innards?
“I spent my whole life avoiding having children for the reason that most people should avoid having children, which was selfishness. I didn’t want to have a child without a partner and I loved kids too much to have them right then, because I knew that the minute I have children my life would change. And then I met Jesse and I went: ‘Wow! There’s that feeling of wanting to procreate because I love someone and I see him to be a good father.’ And the Universe went: ‘No, you have some other things you need to take care of.’ ”
These were the children from James’s first marriage, who live near them in Long Beach. “A life is a life. Whether or not it came from your body should be secondary, in my opinion. If tomorrow I got home and went: ‘Oh my gosh, I’m pregnant’ I’d be like: ‘Wow! Isn’t the Universe amazing?’ But what I learnt was that it’s being more of a parent to care for a child that’s not yours. It’s harder.”
It recently became harder still after a judge awarded James and Bullock temporary custody of Sunny, his five-year-old daughter by his second marriage to the porn star Janine Lindemulder, who is in jail for failing to pay her taxes and is scheduled for release in September. Bullock calls herself Sunny’s “glorified babysitter”, but the courts may yet decide that she will be more than that if James and Bullock make a fight of it.
“But the fight is a sad fight,” Bullock says. “Unfortunately, when there are entities involved that distort a person’s reasoning the fight becomes ugly. I’m hoping that at the end of this journey there won’t be a fight any more and there will be care and safety and there will be harmony. There’s not a quest to take her away. There’s a quest for safety and if safety can be assured there should be harmony and evenness on both sides. And if it’s not safe, [the present arrangement] is staying the way it is.”
Sunny, she adds protectively, to close the topic, is “the most incredible, 1,000-watt light bulb I have ever been around in my life”. The way she talks about the children suggests a change wrought in the careerist Bullock at least as radical as the sour-sweet character transformations her movies promulgate. I take a guess and ask if it can be dated to 2000, the year her mother lost her five-year fight against cancer and in which, eight months later, Bullock survived an air crash when her chartered jet hit a snow bank rather than a runway in Wyoming.
“And then I watched 9/11 happening from a hotel in New York.” So did all that change her? “That year it did nothing because I didn’t do anything about it.” She made Two Weeks Notice with Hugh Grant instead: “Shoved it all down, pretended like nothing happened and continued to work — which was what I was really good at.”
And then? “I quit. I said: ‘That’s it. I’m done. I’ve done the romantic comedy genre with the person I wanted to do it with. I’m happy with the result.’ It was a success. It made all the people money. Once again a girl in a film could actually attract some dollars. I was happy, everyone was happy, and then I just shut down. I said: ‘Something isn’t right in my life and I don’t know what it is. So it’s time to take myself out of the work mix which is my crutch.’”
She restored a building in New York and made good the mess a builder had made of her home in Austin, Texas. The year became 18 months. She was not in a relationship. Was it a happy time? “Happy, difficult, revealing. I don’t think we’re taught to grieve. I think we are taught to pull up our socks and move on, especially in a European community, especially a German community. I pulled up my socks and I’m very good at pulling up my socks, but it was time to stop and see what was mine. What is my mother’s? What is society’s? What is truly my stuff and what has no place in my life any more? And you’d be amazed, if you gave yourself solitude, what’s not yours.”
Has she sorted it out now? “Absolutely not,” she whoops. But a shiver passes through her, as if she has just remembered where she is. “You know, I still don’t like this process. I feel like I’ll have to shower at the end of the day. I’ll be in the shower and be like: ‘I’m so dirty!’ But, again, it has nothing to with you. It’s all me. I don’t allow someone else to make me feel any way. It’s my baggage. It’s my thought processes.”
Well, I say with sincere bemusement, she must be a very interesting woman to live with. “I’m sure there’s a very large man in a hotel room near by who would beg to differ. But I do know that he finds me entertaining.”
I thank her for entertaining me. “I was being paid,” she says. So was I, I reply, wondering which of us got the better of the deal. Did Sandra Bullock succeed in saying nothing — or does she leave that to a few too many of her movies?
The Proposal opens on July 22
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