Sandra Bullcock

People love to ask who the craziest/meanest/bitchiest person you've interviewed was. My go-to answer, as is not surprising these days, and as I have mentioned before is Christian Bale. But in addition, another colorful character I encountered was the interesting Ms. Sandra Bullock.

This was a couple of years ago, at the junket for her winter thriller flop Premonition (I actually didn't think it was that bad, but that is surely due to low expectations). First, the junket consisted of roundtables--for writer Bill Kelly and co-star Julian McMahon. Kelly has faded from my memory such that if he walked into my house and sat on my face, I'd be like, 'Who are you?' And perhaps, also, 'What are you doing in my house? And, for that matter, on my face?'

Julian McMahon was a little more memorable--likely especially to the other junket journos moreso than I. McMahon is one of the dishy docs (or whatever) from Nip/Tuck, which I personally have never watched. However, the room was filled with a batch of menopausal women journos who were absolutely faint with their last good estrogen high of their lives at his presence. He arrived a few minutes late, promptly apologized (like a nice, polite person) for the traffic or whatever bullshit that made him late, and then promptly enraptured the sewing circle with his Australian accent, blue eyes and humble yet flirty demeanor (this guy is, I think, from the George Clooney school of, What? Who? Me? Hot? Nah. ... Want to take your pants off?). The women tittered and giggled and everyone was happy.

Then they shuffled us to the big rooms for a press conference, because evidently Ms. Bullock is too amazing to sit with us plebes in a roundtable like everyone else on her film. Let me put it to you this way--sometimes there are press conferences, sometimes there are roundtables. Generally, the smaller the movie or smaller-name the talent, the more likely you are to get a roundtable or a 1:1 interview. However, it's not a hard and fast rule. And sometimes you get roundtables for movies like Hairspray and interview John Travolta from 1 foot away. But this is absolutely the only time that I have ever experienced a combination of both, which is obviously indicative that the rest of the talent was cool enough to do roundtables but Ms. B was like, 'Me? At a roundtable? HELL NO. They will all perish from my greatness if they get this close.'

So, rather than slumming it, we were broken out into two large press conference rooms, which also meant that since she was the only talent for the press conferences, that one room would have to wait the half hour or whatever and go second. Which sucks, and was made worse by the fact that she was also late. And didn't apologize. And then acted like a attitudinal maniac when she got there.

Okay, maybe that is slightly harsh. But let's just say, she did not give me the warm fuzzies. Someone asked her a question about children/being a mother/blah blah, which, as you will know from previous posts, makes sense because in this movie she is a mother and the convention is you can get away with asking these questions in this circumstance. She was not having it. She yelled at us for being inappropriately interested in her reproductive organs (perhaps true, but as I have also said before you can dispense with that politely). Then she went onto some insane tangent about how her step children are her children (ok), she is a mother (all right), doesn't need children to come out of her womb to make her their mother (true, I guess), the world should adopt more (well, yes...), and they should do better interviews of people who are parents to make them better parents and if we all just started paying attention to our neighbors and taking care of them the world would finally be a good place (um...). Or something. It was a tirade, it was off point, and it got, how do you say, ranty and bitchy and, well, crazy.

In short, America's Sweetheart had an edge to her, and not a soft peachy one, either. Which makes sense, all told, since the day before when I was doing my research on her discovered that someone had enjoyed themselves on her Wikipedia page, peppering the entry with references to her as Sandra 'Bullcock' and slipping in that in high school she was voted 'most likely to bang your dog.' IMO, she kind of deserved it.