Sandra Bullock: The Star Next Door

Hot off of her star-making role in the action movie Speed, Sandra Bullock was the cover-girl for the April 1995 issue of Movieline magazine.  Interviewer Stephen Rebello was clearly won over by her easy, down-to-earth charm as she gobbled down a plate of cheese fries and described what kind of sandwich could bear her name.

It used to be that a girl would have this town eating out of her palm for the way she tossed a mane of hair and slid off a pair of gloves. Or the way she slinked across a Steinway crooning a torch song. Or how she ray-gunned space aliens into kingdom come. Sandra Bullock got Hollywood eating out of both her palms for the way she drove a bomb-rigged bus all over the urban sprawl of L.A. Last year’s high-rpm low-brainer Speed made a zillion bucks and plunked Bullock in the driver’s seat for a good couple of years of starring roles in biggish movies, including, probably, another Speed. Already raking in, post-Speed, a reported $2 million per, Bullock boasts a schedule so clogged it knocked her out of the running to play the captivating Sabrina opposite Harrison Ford, as well as the Caped Crusader’s love interest in Batman Forever.

Meanwhile, with three movies due out this year, she seems to be everywhere. Looming large on magazines’ yearly “hot” lists. Wowing Dave on his talk show. Presenting an MTV Music Award. Why, even the town’s hottest celebrity deli is fighting for the chance to name a dish after her. But what would the dish be? Would it be the Sandra Bullock Steak Bomb? Or, maybe, the Sandra Bullock Vol-au-Vent–lots of puff, not much inside? Bullock has so far struck me as wholly likable, kind of an un-neurotic, comfy, man-on-the-street’s Julia. So, as we’re sitting down for a Sunday morning powwow at Larry Parker’s diner. I clench my teeth and wonder: is This Instant’s Brownette going to be full of herself?

Bullock turns up right on time, fresh-faced, in farmer bib overalls, emitting an instantly friendly, baggage-free vibe. Smiling up from the menu, from which she can select such star delicacies as Wesley Snipes‘s Grilled Chicken Breast or Michael Jackson’s Hot Tuna Melt, she orders a gooey slope of cheese fries as a side for a BLT and recites the recipe for her celebrity deli sandwich. “The Sandra Bullock Sandwich has to be marsh-mallow fluff and peanut butter on toasted white bread. I told them, ‘If you’re going to do it right, you have to make it with good fluff, not the cheap fluff, and the bread can’t be mushy, it has to be toasted crispy. But the bread’s definitely white.'”Hmmm. She certainly sounds hip to herself.

“What do you make of all this post-Speed Sandra Bullock hoopla?” I ask her, hoping to find out exactly how hip to herself. “I look at it this way,” she declares. “Lots of people in this town go with what’s ‘hot’ at the moment–you know, like, that’s who you should make movies with or, socially, that’s who you should be with in a relationship. The mistake people make is to jump in and go for something that’s like a nice, shiny new sports car rather than looking at a Chevy that’ll last you your entire life. A Chevy is, you know… nice. It’ll always come back into fashion. Things always come around every three years. I’ll always be in fashion every three years.” So, she’s closing in on Porsche-level salaries for her movies and she compares herself to a Detroit workhorse? Let the fun begin.

First, however, Bullock obviously wants to check me out, too. “Do you pick the people you interview or do the magazines say, like, ‘We want you to do this Speed girl?'” I tell her that, as a free agent. I say yes or no, and add, “If you’re asking if I liked Speed, I thought it was a piece of shit. Did I like you in it? Sure.” Bullock lets out a loud guffaw. “I love the fact that you say it’s a piece of shit.” she says. “Most people go on and on, ‘Oh. I love that movie.” But look, it was what it was. I read Speed and I remember thinking, ‘Now, why do I want to do this?’ Everyone was telling me, ‘I don’t think you should do it.’ But I was like. ‘Hey, I’m not doing anything right now and I want to go have some fun.’ Everyone on it had a warped, twisted sense of humor and it turned out fine, didn’t it?”

At this point, Bullock is merrily wagging her head and boogying in our booth as the deli’s video monitors blast out vintage “Soul Train” clips. The TV screens erupt with an afro-coiffed dancing machine writhing in electric lime green, skintight polyester. “Oooh, yeah, here we go,” she shouts, beaming, dancing with him in her seat like her back ain’t got no bone. “Hippity-hop, hippity-hop, baby. Do the Funky Cowboy! Oh, my God, I love ‘Soul Train.’ Starring Mr. Don Cornelius, the man with the lowest voice who never, ever aged. What is it about dance show hosts, anyway? Like Dick Clark, too. Forever young.” The waiter, who’s been setting out more of our grub during Bullock’s “Soul Train” epiphany, looks that close to proposing marriage.

“I really eat sloppy,'” she warns once the waiter’s gone. “I’m such a slob that I figure instead of going against it, go with it and palm it off as my style.” Sure enough, she drops a fry splat on the tabletop photo collage featuring Angelyne, the pneumatic. Dynel-wigged, aged sex kitten whose billboard ads bombard this city. “And everything she’s got is totally real,” I josh, noticing Bullock eyeing Angelyne ‘s improbable gazongas. “Gravity is not that kind,” she fires back. Sighing, she muses. “Angelyne, now that’s famous.”

No two ways about it, Bullock is pretty famous right now. In fact, just as I’m about to ask what sort of fan reaction she sparks these days from mall rats, two young guys who’ve been pretending not to watch her since we walked in sidle over to our table. They’re 17, 18 tops, and cute as hell, all gelled hair, Beverly Hills-style hip threads and moves that shout “Actor!”

“You came out in Speed, right?” asks the Billy Baldwin-in-training of the pair. Bullock answers with a nod and a moonbeam grin. The second kid, a Doogie Howser type, chimes in, “But you came up in Demolition Man with Stallone and, like, in that other one that never came out, with River Phoenix?” Only in this town would someone remember the star-crossed The Thing Called Love, in which Bullock sang a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll alongside Phoenix, Samantha Mathis and Dermot Mulroney. “Yup,” she says, cheerfully rifling through her bag for a pen to autograph the napkins they’ve handed her.

“How old are you?” they bark, almost in unison. “Twenty-eight,” she answers, which slays them. “Man, you look so much younger.” says one.

She apes delighted astonishment when they tell her that they are aspiring actors. “We were practicing outside for this Levi’s commercial when we saw you come in,” explains the Howser replicate. “But first they had us doing acting exercises, saying gibberish, like, ‘Bunny-bunny-bunny.'” She commiserates: “They’re just trying to get you on tape looking stupid, so later, when you’re famous, they can show you on some TV special going, ‘Bunny-bunny-bunny!'”

After they shamble off, she mutters, “God, they were so cute. Bunny-bunny-bunny.”

Nice that Bullock hasn’t lost empathy with her own Bunny-bunny-bunny days, which, after all, weren’t so long ago. Just a few years back, she was fronting direct-to-video wonders like Fire on the AmazonReligion, Inc. and Who Shot Patakango? Missed those?

Bullock is completely open about what she calls “those $25-a-day student films.” She says, shrugging, “Who was I to say no? They offered me money, movie experience, I took it. No matter how bad the movie is, no matter how many times I go. ‘Oh my God, that’s on TV again!’ everybody has films like that show up all over the place. If it wasn’t for the first funny little, embarrassing things that I did I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

I ask Bullock whether she suffered any casting couch indignities while coming up through the ranks. “One, in New York,” she recalls. “But it had nothing to do with this industry. I was trying to find an apartment for friends of mine who were moving from California, so I went to see this guy who had an apartment and he had, like, a scarf around his neck. He must have seen me looking, like, ‘Yo, what’s with the scarf?’ and he said, ‘I am a director,’ as if that explained it, I was, like, ‘Oh yeah? I’m an actor,’ and he’s, ‘Oh, really?’ After I said. ‘Well, I’m here to see the apartment,’ he sits me down and we go through this long conversation and at the end of it, he says, ‘Okay, drop your pants.’ I’m, like. ‘You’re joking, right?’ but he wasn’t, and I was so mortified I had to run out of there. He’s going. ‘You’ll never make it in show business because you’re too sour! You’ve got to do these things.’ I’m running out, blubbering, “I quit, I quit!'”

In Hollywood, she explains, nothing like that’s ever happened. “People don’t see me as the little sexy hot tamale they could have a good time with.” she says.

One thing to be said about learning the ropes through seat-of-your-pants moviemaking is that it offers opportunities for picking up survival skills. Like how to protect oneself from nudie footage surfacing later on. On Fire on the Amazon, an ecological thriller made for legendary skinflint Roger Corman, Bullock taped over her nipples with duct tape. “Don’t use duct tape on your breasts,” she warns. “We were shooting in the Amazon, for chrissake. Our entire equipment was a lightbulb and a piece of duct tape. I found that duct tape is also highly effective for bikini lines. But for covering up, I would suggest another kind of tape that’s not meant to be permanent. Or else, put a bag over your head and just do the scene naked. Hey. I did it for art!”

The only thing that art led to, however, was stepping into the pumps of Melanie Griffith in the short-lived, widely panned TV version of Working Girl. Did she glean anything about Griffith that she hadn’t know before? “Yeah, that I can’t fit into her shoes, which are two sizes smaller than mine,” she says, with a nice edge. “That show was the hardest thing I ever had to do, and I was so miserable, because the [creative team] was trying to fit a square peg into a very round hole. At the time. I didn’t know how to fight and say, ‘This is wrong. It’s bad. It’s not A funny.’ One thing I know is that you can’t make me a straight man.”

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You won’t catch her being the straight man in anything she has planned for the next few years. She just wrapped the wistfully comic While You Were Sleeping, a kind of ’90s spin on the screwball classic My Favorite Wife, in which she’s smitten with Peter Gallagher, who’s comatose, while being romanced by his brother, Bill Pullman, who isn’t. Next, she’s an agoraphobic computer nerd terrorized by cyber thugs in The Net, then a bluecollar art thief sparring with fellow crook Denis Leary in Two If By Sea, then a scientist romanced by a time-traveling 18th-century British nobleman in Kate and Leopold. But what if the heat were to cool and to lead her one day to, say, ”Sandra!” her own TV sitcom? “In which I’d play the quirky girl-next-door with a funky hairdo and an edge?” she offers, not missing a beat. “Well, if that’s where my career is at and where my head is at, I’ll do it. I would do a show like Absolutely Fabulous. or something where you’d surround yourself with a good creative team and just have a field day.”

Well, I remind her, since my research had told me that her mother was an opera singer and her father a vocal coach, and since I know she herself warbled a tune in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love, she could also pursue music. “Actually, I’m thinking about cutting the album right now,” she drawls, in mock movie star-cum-rocker style. “I’ll call it The Thing Called Me. But the kind of album I’d want to do, somebody already has done. Tom Jones’s latest album is phenomenal. I want to meet that guy, spandex and all. I must have that man’s autograph,”

No fear. Her days of hounding other people for autographs seem over for quite some time. Does it bug her that other, bigger female stars were considered first for some of the roles she is now tackling? Notably, Julia and Demi. “No, it’s flattering,” she claims. “I totally understand there’s a long list of people ahead of me and that is where producers and directors need to go first. Demi Moore has been around for a good number of years, done a great body of work and has worked her way up. She deserves it. But While You Were Sleeping was one of those scripts I had on my little pile, and I said, “Nobody could enjoy doing this more than I would.’ When they said. ‘You don’t have to audition for it.’ I said. ‘I’ll audition. I don’t care,’ because meeting me and knowing my work hadn’t really swayed them. So, I went in as the very last audition of the day and I just knew.”

Still, it must be cool knowing that Joel Schumacher wanted her for his Batman sequel (which she couldn’t fit into her schedule, so Nicole Kidman got it instead), and that Sydney Pollack considered her for the title role in Sabrina, which Julia Ormond will play. “I shouldn’t play Sabrina,” she says, “because Audrey Hepburn, the epitome of class, beauty and strength, played that role first.” Laughing, she adds, “Maybe I’ll play Sabrina’s sister, Beatrice, who goes off to Scandinavia and comes back and makes pastries.”

Bullock is becoming well known enough to show up on tabloid TV a time or two. So far, though, the “exposés” have been strictly vanilla stuff. “Every time Hard Copy thinks my face needs to be up there,” she says, “the most exciting thing they can turn up is to show me, like, staggering through an airport half asleep with no makeup on. Too bad they weren’t there the other day when I got off the plane from Chicago and my car wouldn’t start. Now, there was news.”

No one seems able to throw much shade on Bullock’s sunny, unthreatening appeal. The only big money she’s blown recently is on a handsome but not palatial fixer-upper house and a gleaming new BMW for her parents. When pressed, she admits to watching late night TV and being “mesmerized by the infomercial for The Principal Secret, Victoria Principal’s skin care line. I was, like, ‘Oh my God, this must really work,’ and I’m, like, writing down the address furiously. I’m thinking, I’m going to be able to go on TV and say, ‘Victoria, this is great, I feel 20 years younger.’ The next day, though, I got over it. But I almost ordered it.”

She laughs. “One of these days, I figure I’ve got to make up a whole scandal about myself. But, the way I look at it, sometime I’m going to do something that’s going to make it fun for people to give Sandy a hard time. Something where I feel I’m making a smart move, like taking a role or having a relationship with somebody, but that other people are going to see as really stupid.” Considering that her most recent relationship was with actor Tate Donovan, whom she met while making Love Potion No. 9, I can’t help asking, “Why not plunge headlong into a torrid affair with another of your leading men?” She’s already worked with raw material that might appeal to a wide range of tastes: Keanu Reeves, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Pullman, Peter Gallagher. Any sparks?

“I’m really good at keeping things separate,” she asserts. “I say, ‘Acknowledge that, sure, he’s cute and you have chemistry with him, but go home in separate cars. Allow a crush to ride out for two weeks. If it lasts for two weeks, after which time you notice that they sneeze and put on their trousers just like anyone else, then maybe there’s something there.’ But you still don’t have to act on it.” Okay, then, how about marrying a gorgeous scuzzbucket? She squares her shoulders, steadies her quivering lip like a ’40s movie diva and throbs out: “Then I could go on TV and say, ‘So what? He was a good person. Society turned him rotten.'”

Well, a girl’s got to act out in some way. How, since she appears to be so well-adjusted, has she managed to cope with all the sudden attention? “Because of Dr. Seuss, the greatest philosopher of my time,” she answers. “Of my time. Seriously, I carry three of his books around everywhere I go. It’s my version of therapy and it only costs me $30 because I keep giving out his books to other people and have to keep replacing them. Dr. Seuss is just so amazing. The older you get, the more you gel the double meanings.”

Not even cats in hats can get one through some of the dark Hollywood nights of the soul. What else sees Bullock through the stresses of building a career? “I am a huge, huge salsa freak,” she confesses, pronouncing salsa in a way that conjures up percolating rhythms, steamy glances, undulating hips. “I’ve been doing it for two years straight every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night, like clockwork. I started with salsa, but I’m learning next flamenco and tango because, I guess, those are dances where you have to trust your partner. You have to be so comfortable because it’s almost like making love on the dance floor. Nothing makes me happier than dancing. Nothing. It transforms me. The only time I feel completely sensual and sexy and alive is when I’m dancing.  It’s the only time I’ll let out what I know exists inside of me, because I’m in a safe environment in which I can explore that. Eating and salsa are kind of like sex, they just make you feel all-around good. And I am obsessed with it.”

She describes the places, tucked into the out-of-the-way Los Angeles locales, as “another world, filled with Cuban cigar smoke, where you might see this young beefy guy dancing absolutely beautifully with a 70-year-old woman in flip-flops and these 70-year-old men who consider themselves Spanish kings dancing with the hottest women.” And what does Bullock look like when she’s obsessed? “My hair is down and wild and I’m usually in a little black dress with high shoes. The hair, the dress, the heels of the shoes change your whole presence.” She shivers her shoulders, rolls back her head and purrs out a Carmen Miranda-worthy, “Jess! Coochi-coochi-coochi!”

Do Hollywood’s ranks harbor other closet salsa freaks, good citizens whose hips flow to el ritmo latino as laid down by Celia Cruz, Willie Colon and Tito Puente, among others? I’ve heard that director Randa Haines, for whom Bullock made Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, has longed to make a movie set against the backdrop of L.A.’s salsa clubs. “That’s how I learned about it.” Bullock enthuses. “When we were making the movie, every lunch break, everyone was salsaing, including Robert Duvall, who is very good. Randa’s friend, Darryl Matthews, who wrote the script for that movie project with her, is my dancing partner. When Randa gets on the floor and salsas, oh my God, she’s astoundingly sensual, beautiful, powerful. We have talked a lot about that movie project. It’s not a lambada movie or anything, but about people partnering, connecting. I don’t care if the pan is the lead or she asks me to do one line. I want to be part of it and this movie is what she was born to direct.”

Bullock Donovan

All this talk about partnering and sensuality makes me wonder how Bullock’s been coping with the recent breakup of her long relationship with Tate Donovan.” He’s an exceptional human being, a very simple, classy, inspirational person,” Bullock says of the actor and musician, from whom she split six months ago. “It was just one of those things where I had to move away to allow things to take their course. At least we can both say that it had little or nothing to do with this industry, because both of us were very far removed from that mumbo jumbo. The relationship just wasn’t working right. [The breakup] came at a really odd time: all of a sudden the career was doing well, all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from under me. If things had been all that great, though, if I had been like, ‘Oh, I’ve got everything going in my life,” maybe I wouldn’t have appreciated my success or worked as hard as I have since then.

“It’s amazing how,” she continues, “every script I’ve done always comes at a time when my head was in the right place for it. In While You Were Sleeping. I play someone who is really lonely but will never admit to it. She forges through her life until what she is missing most of her life is presented to her. then she has to do without it, give it up, yet still keep a sense of humor about it. I didn’t have to dip anywhere for the emotion I needed in this movie.”

So, until her love life sorts itself out, what’s the prescription? “Luaus and Charo,” she explains. “Before I start The Net, I’m going to Hawaii for my first vacation in a while with a bunch of friends. We rented a house on the beach. The very first night I’m going to find the restaurant Charo runs and go there just to hear her say, ‘Jello, would joo like something to jeet?'”

Given Bullock’s romantic state of flux and her career demands, she may not be ready to hook up amorously with anyone else soon. But when she is, what might be a few good reasons to date her, and a few good reasons not to? “I’m the first person to say, ‘Don’t date me because I’ll probably make you miserable,'” she answers. “But, let’s see, reasons to date me? I’m cheap. No, just joking! But I am playful, funny, patient and a very good dancer. Reasons not to date me include that I’m very independent and I want to do it all myself. I’ll never ask for it, but if somebody quietly helps me and is comfortable doing it, I love it.”

She’s certainly got her admirers. When she appeared on David Letterman’s show, he raved as if he were inscribing her high school year book: “You’re beautiful and you have a great personality!” She swears their edgy flirting confined itself to talk-show-host-snappy-guest badinage. “He’s getting married, you know,” she reminds, mock scoldingly. “But he is incredibly smart, charismatic and witty, and I have a good time with people who kind of, like, needle me at first, so that I have to battle it back and forth with them. Which is why I’m really looking forward to working with Denis Leary on Two If By Sea, because it’s going to be a dogfight. He sparks me. He’s sexy, he’s got that shtick, yet the Denis I know is also a good family guy who smokes a lot and drinks a lot of Coca-Cola. Working with him is going to be like one great, long one-upping session.”

She adds, “But if you’re asking what I really go for, it’s someone who can make me laugh, who makes me forget that I have to entertain people. Also, great hands–expressive hands and forearms–which is what I always look at first. They don’t have to be macho hands, you know, but I don’t like a lot or jewelry, either. Oh, and I don’t want somebody who looks like they have polished nails. Somebody who is comfortable with their hands, touches people warmly, sensitively. Some women and guys look at shoes, I look al hands,”

So, how do my hands rate? “Put ’em up and roll back your sleeves a little more,” she says. I comply. She appraises my mitts and each digit, as if with an invisible jeweler’s loupe, “Very nice, totally seriously,” she declares, finally, adding, “somebody who’s definitely not intimidated. Plus, you’ve got these big, doe eyes going on, which is cool. Something I want to talk to you about, though: the drool down the side of your mouth from your sandwich.” We both crack up. It’s a typical Bullock ploy; after all, it’s she whose mouth needs dabbing off from the cheese fries, “Notice how I kept telling you, ‘Have some fries,’ but I hogged them all for myself? Years from now, you’ll be licking but people will be saying about me, ‘See how she died? Eating cheese fries, that’s how.'”

As I walk Bullock down Beverly Drive to producer-director Irwin Winkler’s office where three household name actors await to read opposite her for The Net, she tells me what she wants from her career and personal life. “I want to be the girl nobody can quite figure out, ‘Is she the funny chick in action movies? Is she the one who does those edgy, touching comedies? Is she the one who does those dramas?’ I just want the chance to keep doing good movies. For my personal life, I would love to be part of a stable couple the press doesn’t find dull and who can come out and say. ‘We have great sex every night and go on excursions together every weekend. We’re monogamous. We love each other. And we’re fabulous.’ Let’s hear it for stable people!”

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Alicia Silverstone for the March Movieline.

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