Sandra Bullock was flying solo at The Minions premiere in London Thursday.
As the 50-year-old, Stella McCartney-clad actress explained to E! News' Maria Menounos on the red carpet, her 5-year-old son Louis Bullock "got sick, so we were up all night. He's better now. He's back." Bullock said she "would never take him to a premiere," then added, "We're going to go see it when we get home!"
In Universal Pictures' 3D computer-animated comedy, in theaters July 10, Bullock voices an ambitious villain named Scarlet Overkill. This is "the first film that I'll be in [that Louis can watch] but he won't know I'm in it," she said.
Doing voiceover work isn't as easy as one might think. "I was doing an amalgamation of three different people. It's so hard! Steve Carell is a god," Bullock raved. "The fact that he does [Despicable Me's] Gru the way that he does and you don't know it's Steve Carell...because you're by yourself in that little box!"
Bullock liked doing off-camera work for a change. "It was great because I would do the voiceover and then they'd go off to Paris and they'd animate," she said. "Six months later they'd come back with the animation. The animation would be so good I would look at my work and I'd go, 'It's terrible! I want to redo it.' And they're like, 'What?' I was like, 'No, let's just ADR it. We don't need to reanimate. I'm gonna try to improve my work to your work because the animators are taking every nuance, every weird thing that you did and turning it into a great motion. The artisans on this are extraordinary. Unbelievable!"
"I'm excited to watch Louis watch it!" she added. "That's what I'm really looking forward to." Bullock joked that Louis has already seen her villainous side, saying, "'That's crabby mommy in the morning! That's crabby mommy when she doesn't fit into her jeans.' No, I'm just kidding—or maybe not!"
(E! and Universal Pictures are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)