FEAR FACTOR
Sandra Bullock can charm her way out of even the most disastrous roles. When stalker rom-com All About Steve earned her a Worst Actress “Razzie” in 2009 (the same year she won an Oscar for The Blind Side), she turned up to accept the award with a wheelbarrow of DVDS. “Everyone gets a copy,” she announced. “Watch the movie, and consider if it was really and truly the worst performance. And then I will come back next year, and I will give back the Razzie.”
Actually, the film really wasn’t very good, and I suspect Bullock knew it — but it was hardly the first critical calamity from which she emerged unscathed. For every brilliant, beloved film she has starred in — Speed, Miss Congeniality, While You Were Sleeping, The Heat, Gravity — there has been a Speed 2, a Miss Congeniality 2, or an All About Steve. Even in those, though, Bullock’s intense likeability renders her bulletproof. Equal parts goofy and glamorous, the 54-year-old is a proto-jennifer Lawrence, a Hollywood star we could never possibly emulate, but who somehow convinces us we could.
She likes to be selfdeprecating, she tells me, as she settles into the sofa of a hotel room in Berlin. She’s here to promote her new film, Bird Box, but made sure to take her kids to the Christmas market this morning. “If you’re not, things will get to you in a way that will just take your spirit away. I like my spirit, I don’t want my spirit to go anywhere.”
But work, she says, she takes very seriously. In fact, she has hardly stopped working since 1994 sleeper hit Speed — an action thriller in which she played a passenger on a bus packed with explosives — made her a household name.
From there, she has played an FBI agent posing as a beauty pageant contestant in action comedy Miss Congeniality (2000), a racist housewife in controversial Oscar-winning drama Crash (2004), a Canadian executive facing deportation in romantic comedy The Proposal (2009), and a stranded astronaut fighting for her life in sci-fi thriller Gravity (2013). Now, having decided that “before I die I wanna do every genre, just so I can say I did it,”