Entertainment Weekly May 1995

Entertainment Weekly (May 95)

Sandra's ten tips to survival of fame.

1. LEARN TO LIKE THE TRANSIT SYSTEM

Sandra Bullock gets attention in the oddest places. There she was in the winter of 1993, sitting behind the wheel of an L.A. County bus, day in, day out, looking at the same scenery and living in the same costume- one baggy rayon dress she'd picked out but grew to hate in the first week. On a bad day, she worried that she was suffering from carbon-monoxide poisoning, and that the kink in her neck- which she'd gotten by constantly turning around to talk to the people sitting behind her- was the first stage of cancer. On a good day, she managed to fixate on these things and still swerve, scream, and smile- that loopy, only-Julia-Roberts-does-it-wider grin, in all the right places.
There must have been a lot of good days, because when Speed, which, not incidentally, costarred Keanu Reeves, was released last June, Sandra Bullock became famous faster than she ever drove that careening bus. "I was out of the country," when Speed opened, Bullock, 28, says 10 months later, nestled in a couch at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, with a pillow between her knees and another curled under her arm like a teddy bear. "So I wasn't part of the animal I created. When I came back, it was like there was a whole other me. It was very interesting."

Since the release of While You Were Sleeping, the new fairy-tale romantic comedy in which she stars, things have become even more interesting for Bullock. She plays Lucy Moderatz, a dreamy subway-token clerk who's alone in the world until she rescues and falls for a man (Peter Gallagher) who falls onto the train tracks. Along the way, she also falls for the brother of Coma Guy (the film's original title), played by Bill Pullman, winning his heart without once putting on lipstick or combing her flop-topped hair. But if she lacks on-screen glamour, the audience doesn't mind a bit: The film premiered at No. 1 last weekend, with a $9.3 million box office gross, proving Bullock can carry a romantic comedy and open it as well.

That Demi Moore was originally in line to play Bullock's part would be heady for any young actress. But Bullock, who is dressed in a cute-as-a-button pink matching sweater set and is still wearing her napped-in Live With Regis & Kathie Lee makeup, insists Moore doesn't need to watch her back: "There's this one list, and there's another list, and I'm somewhere in the middle of the second list, and she's on the other list, so we're not on the same list." (Not to mention that Moore would have earned 10 times Bullock's $1.2 million salary.) She pauses to catch her breath. "I just want to thank her, thank her for being so busy and letting me have this," she says seriously. But then that slow-spreading, ear-to-ear grin appears: "I'm so grateful, I gave her half my check. She bought a new dress."

In fact, in the good old, just-wrapped-but-not-released Speed days, Bullock, then known best as Sylvester Stallone's wisecracking partner in Demolition Man, may have been pretty far down on that second list for Sleeping. "I was the last person to audition," she admits, wearing all the confidence of someone who knows she's not about to be back there anytime soon. "And when I walked into the room to audition, all of a sudden I'm back on Off Broadway. Everybody's sitting there. I've got (producer and Disney chairman) Joe Roth right next to my ear, and I'm talking to this dead guy in a coma, who's some reader they've brought in. But I loved this film so much, I wasn't nervous." Bullock had wanted the part since first seeing the script, "but I was told they were going for a name, and Speed hadn't come out. Then thay said, 'We'd love to have you come in,' and I said, 'Great, I'll be there in about five minutes.' " And that's about how long Bullock is willing to wait for anything.

2. EMBRACE YOUR DARK SIDE

With While You Were Sleeping, Bullock has established herself as the comedic actress hinted at in Speed, as well as in 1993's Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (she was a waitress) and Peter Bogdanovich's 1993 The Thing Called Love (as a country-singer wannabe). But it's in Lucy's lonliness- as a friendless orphan, eating TV dinners with a cat as her only companion- that Bullock shows a depth she might prefer not to have mined. "There's one thing that puts people at ease, and that's humor," she says. "I'd say 50 percent of my humor is because I feel great, and the other 50 percent is because I want to make others feel comfortable, so I can get comfortable. It's definitely a control zone. You look at the funniest person in show business, and I'll show you someone who's been through a lot of garbage." When Bullock began filming While You Were Sleeping in Chicago last fall, she'd just ended a four-year relationship with actor Tate Donovan (Love Potion No. 9), and she was no longer an ingenue whose only task was to exceed others' expectations. "There were scenes that I dreaded, because I would have to go to that horrible dark place in myself," she says, sinking farther into the couch. "A lot of things went down in a year and a half. My career happened, and something that I had built for four years went away. One rug was pulled out from under me, and another one was put in."

3. KNOW YOUR PHOBIAS

Make that rug a flying carpet. Almost immediately after finishing While You Were Sleeping in December, Bullock jumped into Irwin Winkler's The Net, a thriller in which she plays a reclusive and unhappy computer wizard who gets into serious trouble when her identity is erased. While Bullock didn't lose herself in the part, her character's distress still cut close to the bone. "I'm very driven....Whatever I do, I do to the nth degree," she says. "It's a little scary when you're (in the role)- how many levels of despair can you play? Eventually, you come out on the other side." Bullock says she might not have been able to play a character like this a few years ago, but now, "the one thing I've become more comfortable with is showing my weakness and my vulnerability. It's the hardest thing. But it's given me confidence to say, 'This is who I am.' My biggest fault is that I was playing the martyr a lot, saying 'No, no, as long as you're happy,' " she intones in worried-Yiddish-grandmother-speak. What she realized from her breakup was that "the foundation wasn't solid. And the foundation wasn't solid because of my fear. Total fear."

4. THINK BLUE-COLLAR

Where has this revelation led her? "You know, I loved Donovan with everything that I have, but it frightened me too much." She pauses, ready to introduce her new philosophy. "I'm afraid of actors. I don't understand actors," she says without irony. But isn't she one of this scary breed? "I do consider myself an actor," she demurs. "But with more of a blue-collar mentality."

Considering her priveleged childhood, it's suprising that Bullock sees herself as a working-class heroine. The daughter of John, a voice coach, and Helga, an opera singer, Bullock grew up in Washington, D.C., and Europe and attended East Carolina University in North Carolina before heading to New York and the theater. Yet for reasons clear only to herself, "I understand people who work with their hands," she insists. "Those are the people I'm not afraid of." Bullock is certainly used to hard labor: She's been a self-supporting actress since she played the Melanie Griffith role in 1990's short-lived NBC spin-off series Working Girl. "I was so glad it failed," she says. "I was so unhappy there, I was getting ready to pull a postal worker. It was not funny," she adds, "but it paid well, and I stashed my money away."

5. AVOID SCARY FANS

Despite constantly working, she's only experienced the seedier side of fame in the last few months. "I realized things were different when a flashbulb came over the stall door when I was peeing," says Bullock, who promised the camera owner that she could take a picture once the actress was safely out of the stall. Bullock now books herself into hotels under a pseudonym an occasionally hangs out with a friend who doubles as a bodyguard. "But yesterday was the first time I was incredibly overwhelmed," she says. "I can handle anything, but I have to know it's coming, and this I didn't expect. We were doing Letterman and there was a whole side of the street filled with people. I looked out the car window, and I said, 'What are these people doing here?' and (my friends) said, 'These people are here for you.'" She considers the weight of such a sentance. "I called my dad. And he said, 'You're so lucky you've chosen to do this.' It's very fortunate and flattering," she says, trying to put the right spin on the panic. "But it did freak me out."

6. STAY ON YOUR TOES

There's one place Bullock finds total peace. "Salsa dancing!" she exclaims. Robert Duvall taught her how to merengue on the set of Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, but it was the film's director, Randa Haines, who taught her about the finer points of flamenco. Since then, she's found a dance club wherever she's working. When she was in Chicago, she strutted her stuff every Wednesday night with the club's cappuccino maker- "a beautiful dancer"- but cooled her heels after she read that she was not only married to the coffee man but had given birth to several children with him. Now she sticks close to her Los Angeles partner, Daryl Matthews, who is Haines' boyfriend. "When I'm dancing is when I'm most comfortable with myself, the most free and expressive," she says. And while she claims she's not yet at ease with the idea of playing a femme fatale, she loves the salsa uniform: "tight, short skirts, high heels. There's a whole section of my closet devoted to this wardrobe."

7. DO IT YOURSELF

Her usual ensemble? Overalls, Calvin Klein anything, and a rainbow of sweatpants and J. Crew sweaters that hang below her knees. Dresses rarely see the light of day: Bullock's idea of a good time is grouting. Retiling, to be precise. "I've subcontracted some of the work in my home in L.A.," she says reluctantly, "but I'm doing most of it myself." The fixer-upper, which she shares with her sister, Gesine, a law student, and their three dogs, has been a work in progress for a year and a half, and tearing the home apart serves as an occasion for a family reunion. "My parents and I ripped down the kitchen," she says. "We had out our sledgehammers, and it was like, 'Remember that time....' and then crash."

8. KEEP YOUR FOOT ON THE GAS

It looks as if the rest will have to wait: Bullock will wing from project to project in the next year like a hummingbird on adrenaline. She's in Nova Scotia beginning rehearsals for the Denis Leary comedy Two If By Sea, about an ever-arguing couple who steal a precious painting. In September, she may be playing a supporting role as a law student in the thriller A Time to Kill, Joel Schumacher's adaptation of John Grisham's novel, which may star Val Kilmer. (Bullock almost costarred with Kilmer in Batman Forever; she had to turn down Nicole Kidman's role because it conflicted with the Sleeping shoot.) And next spring, she's coproducing and starring in screenwriter and friend Steve Rogers' project Kate and Leopold. Miramax bought the script, about a time-traveling 18th-century nobleman, on Bullock's recommendation; Carrie Fisher is doing a rewrite. The actress' schedule sounds like a recipe for a breakdown as much as a guide to success. But Bullock, who claims that "all I need is weekends off," insists it's all under control.

9. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE ROAD

Bullock's got a couple of weeks off this summer. Her idea of a dream vacation? "I want to take a road trip with friends," she says. "I've seen very little of the United States. I want to get in an RV and cheese it out, staying in Motel 6s. I want to go to Graceland, cheeseball central. I want to hear Tom Jones play in Las Vegas." When met with disbelief, Bullock says in utmost sincerity, "He's my idol."

10. DON'T FORGET HOW TO SPELL 'BITCH'

Bullock is the kind of person who says things like "what goes around comes around" and "I'm a very good person" without looking the least bit self-conscious. But that does not simply she lacks passion. "I rarely lose my temper, and only then when someone talks down to me, or when I see people treating other people with disrespect," she says. "But I let loose- I get angry and I just can't control it. I get scared of how violent I become," she says, motioning with arms so skinny it's hard not to laugh at what seems like bravado. "On Speed, I lost it."
Bullock was talking with one of the extras on the tarmac (where the climactic scene was filmed), and he complained about the noise. Bullock went up to an assistant director and asked if the extras could get earplugs.
"He went up to the extra and said, 'Don't talk to her, don't ever go up to her,' and I said, 'Don't you ever, ever tell someone not to talk to me. You get them earplugs,'" she roars. "I sat there thinking, I'm the biggest B-I-T-C-H that ever lived." They got earplugs.
"You don't own your power," she adds. "You just have it." She pauses, relishing the thought for a brief moment. "You have it, and you do not question it." Lesson learned.