Sandra Bullock joined her friend and fellow actor Jennifer Aniston for a chat as part of the “Practical Magic 2” star’s Interview magazine cover and revealed that she made the intentional decision to step away from the romantic-comedy genre in the mid-2000s because “I was getting so much shit for them.”
Aniston asked Bullock if there was ever a moment where she “made a deliberate choice about the kind of career [she] wanted,” to which the Oscar winner cited two examples. The first was before she a working actor: “I was in New York, I was a waitress, I was auditioning for every pervert that existed asking me to drop my pants. I was like, ‘Nope, not the role for me.’ I was working my way up. Every working actor thinks you will never work again so you just take what you can get and make the most of it.”
The second was when Bullock was already a box office star: “The only time I was intentional about my career was when I said, ‘I need to stop right now with the rom-coms,’ because I was getting so much shit for them. And I took a role in this film called ‘Crash‘… I wanted to start flexing other muscles.”
Bullock was a rom-com regular for much of her early career with hits like “While You Were Sleeping” (1995) and “Two Weeks Notice” (2002) and other offerings such as “Two If by Sea” (1996) and “Forces of Nature” (1999). She’d continue to flex her genre muscles in star vehicles like the 1998 romance “Hope Floats” and 2000’s blockbuster comedy “Miss Congeniality.” But after 2002’s “Two Weeks Notice” with Hugh Grant became a hit, Bullock stepped away for two years and returned with a dramatic role in “Crash.” Now her fans know this was a deliberate choice on Bullock’s part.
“It’s a very risky feeling to say, ‘I’m going to drop what feels like my comfort zone, which is comedies, and let’s see if they’ll take me seriously in the dramatic world,’” Aniston told Bullock. “The industry tends to pooh-pooh comedies, but they’re not as easy as they look.”
“Now more than ever, I miss that. I want to do nothing but that now,” Bullock responded.
Bullock isn’t the only rom-com icon to walk away from the genre amid fame and box office glory. Matthew McConaughey also made the deliberate choice to stop acting in rom-coms and even left Hollywood and moved his family in Texas to distance himself from the box Hollywood was trying to keep him in. He even turned down a $14 million offer to return to the genre.
As for Bullock’s decision to temporarily ditch the rom-com genre in favor of dramatic work, it ultimately paid off with “Crash.” The movie won her the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding ensemble in a motion picture, and the movie went on to win the Oscar for best picture. Bullock would return to rom-coms in 2009 with “The Proposal,” one of her biggest hits, and “All About Steve,” which won her the Razzie for worst actress. But that year also included the release of “The Blind Side,” which won her the Oscar for best actress. Bullock’s most recent rom-com was 2022’s “The Lost City” with Channing Tatum, which was a post-pandemic box office hit with $192 million worldwide.
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