Melissa Hebeler/E! IllustrationAround the turn of the current century, an epic war was waged over who deserved to wear the crown as America's Sweetheart, Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts.
Neither Sandra Bullock nor Julia Roberts actually participated in this war, but it was waged on their behalf by those stuck on the ancient notion that there can only be one true sweetheart.
As we all know now, it turned out there was room enough for both of them to rule, long have been their reigns.
Time has also shown that neither actress, nor any actress, fits so neatly into the tiny little box that such an over-generalizing label serves to fill. But if you're going to use that century-old moniker, they're the standard bearers, the stars who still brighten (almost) any movie with their presence and always command utter reverence on the red carpet.
A reverence they've accidentally maximized by approaching their charmed lot in life with humility, humor and a most anti-diva approach to movie stardom.
"It's so funny, all these references about competition," Bullock told Dennis Hensley in a 1996 interview for Detour when the whipped-up Roberts rivalry was broached. "Why is there plenty of room for guys in this business and they don't pit them up against each other? It's so stupid. There's room for everybody. I think Julia and I should do a film where we make fun of this whole thing, like we're not even the leads. They just have an outtake of like a movie premiere where we get into a huge fight or something. That would be hysterical."
In 2014, while accepting an award for Gravity at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, she joked, "Apparently, Julia—I don't know where you are—but apparently, you and I are in a dispute over George Clooney. We talked about this, right? We share custody, and we are both fine with it!"
How far Hollywood had progressed in those 18 years. Since they've yet to appear in the same film or TV show (other than the Oscars, Golden Globes, et al.), there hasn't been a chance to concoct rumors of a more substantial feud, but—not to start an anti-rumor rumor—we certainly hope that's not the reason they haven't made a picture together, to avoid any "dueling diva" headlines.
Meanwhile, it sounds as though Bullock was pretty tuned in right away to the extra baggage that came with female stardom, the fact that women were just approached from a different angle than the dudes. She was already aware of the absurdity of pitting actresses against each other, long before it was a required part of a serious young actress' mission statement to be that aware.
Ultimately, of course, while her appeal was undeniable, Bullock was also lucky that, after about 10 years in the trenches of working actordom, she broke through and was successful enough so that she got to continuously have a say in what would work best for her—thereby putting herself in power-player mode early on.
Asked in 2003 how she felt about her other title, as reigning "Girl Next Door" (you know, charming, funny, sporty, pretty but not unapproachable, relatable), Bullock just laughed.
"I think I lost that title a little while ago. They give it to like six people, and we share the titles 'Girls Next Door' and 'America's Sweetheart,'" she told Cosmopolitan, which had named her Fun, Fearless Female of the Year. "We literally have to call each other and see who wants it for that week. Like, 'I have to promote a film, so you have to give me the Sweetheart label or I'm not going to get any people in to see my movie. Julia, come on, do something racy. I need the title this week!'"
Ironically, in noting that her goal was to be "comfortable in my own skin for the rest of my life," she added, "If I'm still comfortable being in my skin in front of the camera in several years, great. But otherwise, there's producing."
That was 14 years ago. The camera obviously never stopped loving her.
Next up for Bullock, somehow 53 as of today, is the titular role in Ocean's Eight, playing the estranged yet similarly thieving sister of George Clooney's Danny Ocean (if there's a Clooney cameo, it's a well-kept secret so far).
Now a mother of two young children, she doesn't want to sign onto just anything. She almost didn't do Gravity, telling the New York Times in 2013, "All I had the energy for was being little bun-bun's mom," referring to her then 3-year-old son. "I didn't want to work. But it's hard to say no to Alfonso Cuarón. And Gravity truly felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience." True story: the film won seven Oscars and Bullock earned her second Best Actress nomination.
She shot The Heat with Melissa McCarthy after the grueling Gravity shoot ("I want to make comedic-comedies—let's get back to being funny!" she proclaimed in 2010) and then voiced a character in Minions, but then took her time picking out another script.
When Bullock told Entertainment Weekly in 2015, "About two and a half years ago I put out feelers, saying, 'I'm not reading anything I'm excited about. Are there any male roles out there that [producers] don't mind switching to female?'" she wasn't talking about Ocean's, but about her last live-action movie, Our Brand Is Crisis, which was co-produced by Clooney and was originally intended to be another starring role for him.
The film wasn't a huge hit, but why stop there when you're onto something?
With the help of the likes of Bullock, Cate Blanchett (an Ocean's costar), Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep and fellow actresses who in prior decades might have been increasingly pigeonholed into certain roles but who continue to steer their own career ships into their 40s and beyond, Hollywood has at least made some progress when it comes to the uptick in complex, layered film and TV parts for women.
Having made a seemingly inordinate amount of movies with a number in the title, Bullock's first starring role on the big screen was as the dream girl in 1992's Love Potion No. 9 (though that came after a bet-you-forgot-about-it breakout role in the short-lived TV adaptation of the hit film Working Girl, playing Melanie Griffith's intrepid secretary-turned-corporate executive).
Four years later, after deftly keeping the bus above 50 in Speed turned her into the next big thing and she proved she could open an action thriller (The Net), a rom-com (While You Were Sleeping) and a legal drama (A Time to Kill), and had started her own production company, Fortis Films, she commanded a reported $10 million for the World War I-era romance In Love and War.
"It just happens to be right now that that is such a statement for not only where you are in your career, but it seems to be something that people take a great interest in in representing women and saying, 'It's about time.'" Bullock told Hensley in 1996 when asked about her $10 million paycheck. "That's a nice quality of the money. The other great quality is that I immediately hand it over to my father and say, 'You're in charge of this,' and I can make my small films and not think twice about it. You can secure your family for the rest of their lives. I don't think twice about saying, 'I'm going to buy my parents a car,' or 'I'm taking my best friends to Hawaii for two weeks.'"
Though there was no such thing as the sort of exposure that celebrities face today, with social media and the 24/7 news machine that happily churns out its share of entertainment coverage, Bullock was sensitive to the idea of overexposure and the way public opinion can turn on a dime.
"I need to lay low for a while," she offered. "People are really going to get sick of me. That's why I chose A Time to Kill, because I'm not the center of attention in it but I still get to work. That's the bummer about it. In order to lay low, you have to stop working and I don't want to do that." (In fact, supporting role aside, Bullock was the driving force behind A Time to Kill, and Matthew McConaughey has credited her star power for the studio's choice to take a chance on him, a relative unknown then, in the leading role.)
And how about this, no one got sick of her. The words "I'm sick of Sandra Bullock" have likely never been uttered. So when the 21st century rolled around, Bullock was still America's...
Well, you know.
She made 28 Days, Miss Congeniality, Murder by Numbers, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and the rom-com pièce de résistance, Two Weeks Notice, all before 2005, which she capped off with Miss Congeniality 2. Bullock also took the opportunity to play against type—i.e. be unlikable—in the 2004 ensemble drama Crash.
Bullock told USA Today in 2006 while promoting the fantastical romance The Lake House, "I think I've been bypassed. I've given up the title. There are other sweethearts out there. It's not an easy torch to be carrying."
So consider Bullock the woman who unwittingly has been walking around with an "America's Sweetheart" sign taped to her back for two decades. Possibly taped there by George Clooney.
She's worked opposite some of the biggest actors in the business—Clooney, McConaughey, Keanu Reeves, Ryan Gosling, Viggo Mortensen, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Grant, among others—and is famously friends with, like, all of them. (Well, maybe not Viggo Mortensen—but only 'cause he's off the grid!)
And they have fond memories of working with Sandy, as McConaughey (also an ex-boyfriend), Grant and Reeves confirmed when they joined forces in 2014 to present her with Spike TV's Decade of Hotness honor at the Guys' Choice Awards.
"I feel like I'm at my funeral," the ever-smokin' actress said in what Spike later touted as a "surprise appearance."
"Decade of Hotness," she continued. "My question was, what decade? I have several under my belt. It should really be Decade of Hot Mess. That I can own and I do that well and I'm still convinced I'm up here because someone dropped out and they needed someone quickly and we know I'm home on Saturdays."
Oh, Sandra. But when stars are effortlessly likable, they tend to be endlessly rewarded for that attribute, and Bullock just happens to have It. What brought her to the Guys' Choice Awards also took her to the Razzies in 2010 to be dishonored in person for All About Steve, the day before she won her Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side. Or when she got naked for a Chelsea Lately sketch in 2013. Or paid tribute to the fellow working mamas in her category when she accepted the People's Choice Award just last year for Favorite Movie Actress.
"If you take either one too seriously, shame on you, and if you disregard the other because it's not all you want it to be, then shame on you too," Bullock told The Guardian in 2010 about her dual worst/best wins. "You should be a good sport about it—we're not curing cancer here."
She also joked that the movie business "is meaningless and empty!" She continued, "I'm not wary of it, though—I'm just aware. It holds nothing for me, although it will hold a great table in a restaurant, when you're at your peak. If you don't have other real things in your life that you love just as much, then you will drown in it."
Bullock, irrespective of where she's been on the star chart at any given time, has always lived her life in that vein, striving not to have it "all," but to enjoy and hold fast to the parts of life that actually matter.
But lack of life-and-death consequences aside, making her living as an actress has both afforded Bullock an extraordinarily comfortable life, materially (Forbes estimated her net worth at $200 million in 2015), and a sometimes uncomfortable life when it comes to living in the public eye.
"I am such a privacy freak," she admitted to Vanity Fair in 2000, "and there are times I've seriously thought, Is this something that I can be strong enough to deal with?"
Right after her Oscar win, her marriage to Jesse James imploded in impressively ugly fashion that seemed especially out of place when set against the backdrop of Bullock's decidedly un-scandalous life up till then. So she had to deal with that, right when she was in the process of, unbeknownst to the world, adopting her first child.
Louis made his precious debut with Mom later in 2010 via the strictly controlled environment that is the cover of People, as did his little sister Laila in 2015 (though by then, with the world being what it is, Bullock opted to only show the back of her daughter's head on the cover).
"You feel it's very much like witness protection," Bullock told People about adopting Laila with utmost secrecy. The actress was first a foster parent to Laila and, while the adoption process was underway, a photographer followed them on a trip to the ER. "The next day, I learned that a photo of her was being shopped around for sale to every outlet around the world. I had promised and legally agreed to protect her from something like this, and here I was chasing down lawyers—having them begging them to keep her safe."
So, no social media for Bullock; no inside-the-house pics of the kids; no talking about her live-in boyfriend, Bryan Randall; and no red carpets with him (yet). Though, according to sources, he's providing the kind of companionship that Bullock always envisioned having before life got in the way.
"I seem to have attracted everyone whose intentions were not the best," she told Dennis Hensley back in 1996. Not gold-diggers, per se, "just people whose intentions were so not in tune morally with mine. They were nice people but they just weren't suited for me and that's hard because I seriously thought I'm never, ever going to find anybody that will love me and just enjoy life."
The famous "karma" quote that so often is attributed to Bullock (Google "Sandra Bullock believes in karma") is actually from that interview—meaning the "do unto others" values that have been attributed to her for the past 20 years, through thick and thin, have been in place for a very long time, since long before Jesse James skulked into and out of her life.
"The ex-girlfriend of somebody I was seeing sold a story and said that he had said that I wouldn't make a good mother and that I was a phony and that I made him cringe," she recalled to Hensley. "Out of all the things that were said—that apparently there was an affair going on—I could have cared less.
"It was the two lines where somebody had said that I wouldn't make a good mother, and that's something that I always knew that I would be great at. Kids are the most important thing to me in my life. The reason I haven't had them yet is because I care for them too much to throw them into something that I can't protect them from. It really hurt my feelings that somebody could lie and say that, and I knew it was a lie because something like that would never have come out of this person's mouth. It just shocked me so much that somebody could rock me to the very thing that means the most to me and I've never even met the person.
"The things that have happened to me this year bring out some ugly qualities in people that I can't possibly understand, but I'm a true believer in karma. You get what you give whether it's bad or good."
Going by surface-Sandra alone, the side that those who don't know her intimately can glean from nearly 25 years of knowing of her, it's hard to believe that anyone would purposely betray her. Of course, what's fair and what people deserve, not to mention the complexity of human relationships, is a whole other story, but she's evinced so much positive energy, as an entertainer, a philanthropist, a business owner, a friend and colleague, and, for the past seven years, as a mother...how dare that Jesse James?! Or anyone who hurt her, for that matter.
"The thing that is so endearing about Sandy is that she is normal," Bill Bennett, who directed her in Two if By Sea, told Vanity Fair back in 2000. "She's not hiding anything," added her While You Were Sleeping co-star Bill Pullman. "She just has a great personality. I think she's really enjoying herself and it shows."
The great-personality assessment hasn't varied much over the years.
"I'm sure people will assume people aren't quite who they appear to be onscreen—they're shorter or taller or meaner or dumber—but Sandy is exactly what she appears onscreen, an incredibly charming woman who's really just fun to hang out with," Clooney agreed with the overwhelmingly hopeful assumptions about Bullock in a Reddit AMA in 2014. "Very smart and centered, even though she does drink a lot."
(Sense of humor, check.)
As she told People less than two years ago, her personal marching orders have remained consistent: "Be a good person, be a good mom, do a good job with the lunch, let someone cut in front of you who looks like they're in a bigger hurry. The people I find most beautiful are the ones who aren't trying." At least for the most part, what's gone around has come back around.
Which is why the best table in the house is still reserved for Sandra Bullock.