Sandra Bullock has revealed the inappropriate requests she faced during her early years as a struggling actress in New York City, saying she auditioned for "every pervert that existed" who asked her to "drop" her pants.
The 62-year-old star made the admission in a conversation with her friend Jennifer Aniston for Interview Magazine. Asked whether there was a moment she made a deliberate choice about the kind of career she wanted, Bullock shared an experience she thought Aniston would relate to.
"You'll get this," Bullock began. "I was in New York, I was a waitress, I was auditioning for every pervert that existed, asking me to drop my pants."
Bullock's early roles included Working Girl in 1990, Speed in 1994 and Practical Magic in 1998. She appeared in more than a dozen films, some with much smaller parts, before her breakout roles on the big screen.
Sandra Bullock is revealing the inappropriate requests she received during her early acting career.
Bullock's early roles included the likes of 1990's Working Girl, 1994's Speed and 1998's Practical Magic.
"I was like, 'Nope, not the role for me.' I was working my way up," Bullock continued. "Every working actor thinks you will never work again so you just take what you can get and make the most of it."
Stepping away from rom-coms
The Miss Congeniality star told Aniston she made a deliberate decision to pull back from romantic comedy roles at one point in her career.
"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 s**t for them," Bullock explained. "And I took a role in this film called Crash."
Bullock played Jean in the 2004 film Crash, co-starring Don Cheadle and Thandiwe Newton, in which racial tensions collide across a collection of intertwined stories involving residents of Los Angeles.
"It was a genius film. I wanted to start flexing other muscles," Bullock told Aniston.
The Oscar-winning actress said filming the 2013 movie Gravity "was the most meaningful" because it was "paralleling" where she was in her life.
Since Crash, Bullock went on to star in The Blind Side in 2009 and Gravity in 2013. But she didn't abandon rom-coms altogether, later appearing in The Proposal alongside Ryan Reynolds. The Practical Magic 2 star admitted the genre is exactly the kind of work she prefers these days.
"Now more than ever, I miss that. I want to do nothing but that now," Bullock added.
Her most meaningful role
Elsewhere in the Interview Magazine profile, Bullock named the film role that meant the most to her.
"The one film that was the most meaningful to me, because it was paralleling where I was, was Gravity," she told Aniston, referring to her 2013 film alongside George Clooney. "It was during a really dark time in my life. I was raising and protecting a little smurf while I was trying to grieve, trying to get out of it."
Although Clooney co-starred in the film, Bullock spent much of the shoot strapped to an axis rig inside an LED light box, with no scene partner physically present, which she found an isolating experience.
"Being locked in a box by myself with no one to talk to for nine hours a day, you do a lot of thinking," she continued.
By the time Bullock filmed her role as an astronaut in Gravity, she was already mother to her first child, Louis, whom she had secretly adopted in 2010. Extra attention fell on Bullock around that time after it emerged that her then-husband, Jesse James, had been unfaithful.
In April 2010, James checked himself into a rehab facility in Arizona for sex addiction after apologizing profusely to Bullock, though it wasn't enough to save the marriage.
