Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves's spunky impromptu bus driver in Speed, invites our reporter home for a friendly afternoon sugar high.
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"Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!" Sweetly hollering with mock psychotic glee, Sandra Bullock brings the blade of her kitchen knife down on her chocolate bunny's neck. Chunks of leftover Easter candy fly past my tape recorder and land in my lap. "In 15 minutes we're going to crash and burn from sugar highs," she says, easing out of Fudd-speak. "We'll be hating each other. But don't worry, I'll scrape you off the ceiling if you'll scrape me off the ceiling."
This positively endearing invitation to minor madness is oddly in keeping with the persona Sandra Bullock projects on the big screen. Unaffected and accessible, lovely without being a knockout, sensual without having the slightest bimbo vibe, she easily brings to mind the likable, resourceful young woman she plays who takes over the wheel of the bomb-rigged bus in Speed.
Since wrapping Speed late last year, Bullock has been laying tile, razing walls, refinishing doors, running electrical wires, and going a bit stir-crazy in her recently purchased Beachwood Canyon fixer-upper, and she has kindly agreed to take me on a tour of the results. Right now, she and I are munching our chocolate at the circular table in her homey dining room, letting the sugar rush take us from topic to topic--from love scenes ("Sylvester was gentle; Keanu was cool") to her real-life love (actor Tate Donovan, her co-star from Love Potion No. 9).
Does Tate live here too, I ask? "I'm so afraid of relationships," Bullock answers. "Besides, my sister's living here, and three's a crowd." She shifts into the put-out mode of a drama queen and sobs, "Why do you ask me this? Why do you pick such a painful topic?!" After vamping her way past the subject of romance, she changes gears completely by gesturing toward three primitive-looking paintings of frugging stick figures that dominate this white, round-walled, dome-ceilinged room. "At night, when I light candles, it looks like they're dancing," she says. She points to the last figure in the series. "And see that one? He's got a gun to his head and he's blowing his brains out."
At this point in her career, Bullock relates to the celebratory figures rather than to the one who's Kurt Cobaining himself. She's doing all right, after all. Before Speed she scored with viewers as the airhead future-cop who wanted to fuck Sly Stallone in Demolition Man. In less broadly seen fare she was chloroformed by Jeff Bridges in The Vanishing, had a small but coveted role as a waitress in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, and she truly turned the few heads that took in Peter Bogdanovich's barely released country-music ensemble film The Thing Called Love. With a fun-ride like Speed, Bullock's likely to ascend beyond her previous low-level stardom, which was basically the kind that makes you well-known to casting directors, producers and celebrity stalkers, but not hordes of moviegoers.
Unlike most busy actors who are not yet household names, Bullock insists that she is not a star. More stunningly, she adds that she doesn't necessarily expect to be one. "I've worked with people who are huge stars," she says, tossing me another hunk of chocolate. "They walk into a room and everybody is like, Oh, my God. They command a room. I don't have that kind of charisma--and I'm not sure I could handle having it. It's important to know what you possess and how to use it. I figure that God gave me a certain amount to work with, and that's what I try to do."
In the next breath, though, Bullock concedes that she noticed on a recent trip to New York that something has elevated her recognition rating. She was in a restaurant with Donovan (he's been appearing on Broadway in Picnic) when a group of little girls snapped a picture of her in mid-bite. Then, in another restaurant, a male fan slipped her a mash note. "I was very flattered because he actually knew my name before he introduced himself to me," Bullock remembers. "He said that he was very excited to meet me and that if I ever wanted to have coffee and talk with him, he would like that." Just for fun I ask her if she'd ever actually do that.
"I'm not that stupid," she says. Bullock claims that the only scary fan interaction she's experienced took place in the dressing room of a SoHo clothing store. "The saleswoman came in to hand me an outfit," she continues. "I was standing there in my underwear and she said, 'You look familiar.' I replied, 'Get out of here, and don't tell anyone that my bra and panties don't match.'"
Bullock leads me on a stroll through the house --still a work in progress. In the living room--which has a giant picture window that looks out on a wildly grown backyard that's the size of a small park--she reaches for a black-and-white photo of Keanu Reeves. She stares at the image of him and marvels at her luck in nailing her co-star (photographically). "It was the only time he turned toward the camera," she says. "Nobody could ever get him to pose for a picture." Framed alongside the picture of Reeves are snapshots of Tate Donovan mooning the camera ("That was taken during the shooting of Memphis Belle," she says, "and you know how guys are when they're together") and a bloodied Bullock on the bus that serves as Speed's centerpiece.
"I don't like blood makeup because it's made from corn syrup, which attracts flies -- and that's not very attractive." Bullock looks back again at the Reeves picture. "Keanu is so mellow, a saint," she says. "He's so relaxed, so centered. He seems to know what works for him and what doesn't; I, on the other hand, am always in turmoil. I feel compelled to constantly entertain people while he just sits there, providing the soothing element."
I had heard that Bullock has a slightly steamy moment on-screen with Reeves and wonder how that went for the actress who once wore electrical tape over her nipples in the straight-to-video Fire on the Amazon as insurance that no aureoles would show up in the final cut. "Keanu and I did not exactly have a love scene--darn it," she says, sprawling on an odd-looking wood-slatted reclining chair. "But it is a scene of mutual affection. We were standing in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard and I was handcuffed. We'd start kissing and I'd be there thinking that people were looking at the way I kiss and wondering, 'Why does she do it that way?' Keanu's so sure of himself, but I was back there spraying the Binaca and hoping that I don't offend him."
She contemplates this for a beat, then adds, "A scene like that is nerve-racking at first. But in the long run, when you look back at it and have a glass of wine and spill the beans, you're like, Yeah, I like my job. I get to kiss Keanu Reeves for crying out loud! I'll be the envy of all the women from six to 60." Bullock drops the hyperbole, then quietly concludes, "At least I got to kiss a nice person instead of a schmuck."
Like much of the art throughout Bullock's house, the pieces that dominate her living room are dark iconic religious images by Terrell Moore, a painter friend of hers from Venice, California. They suit the sprawling, Mediterranean-style home with its wrought-iron chandeliers, beamed ceilings and ornate fireplace stocked with red votive candles. However, what is noticeably missing are real trappings from what Bullock does day-to-day. There are no prop souvenirs from her films--no electrical tape from Fire on the Amazon, none of the hair that was glued to the actress's upper lip in Love Potion No. 9. I ask where the movie souvenirs she's managed to salt away are hidden.
"You mean, which ones did I steal?" she asks. "I took the baton from Demolition Man and I have a heart-shaped ring from Speed. But I keep those things in a closet. That way I can look at them when I feel like it, and if somebody wants to see props from a film, they can pay $3.00 and rent them. From Thing Called Love my wardrobe was so scary that I didn't want to save any of it. That's why I bought this couch instead."
The sofa in question is a huge gold thing with rolled arms and clawed feet that dominates the living room like a life raft in the middle of a big, empty swimming pool. "Me and Sammy [co-star Samantha Mathis] would go antique shopping every spare minute we had. I walked into a store, saw the couch, and knew that I had to have it. But then I didn't want to pay too much for the couch to be shipped here -- I'm a real bargain hunter--so the prop guys brought it back for me." She looks down at the chipped brown legs of the sofa and sadly adds, "But the feet got banged up."
Though this swell house clearly serves as proof that Bullock has arrived, she takes pains to point out that its beauty (for her at least) resides in her having become a hands-on laborer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rooms where tiles cover the floors. A woman who views tiling as therapy--a few years back, when her career temporarily went south, she retiled much of a West Hollywood rental--Bullock holds out her lye-damaged hands. "I bought all the tiles in Mexico and brought them back in my truck," she explains. "But there were so many that my friends had to walk to the border to keep the car from being weighed down. We rented a U-Haul as soon as we got on the American side."
`From the basement I hear the barking and scratching of Bullock's dogs ("They make phone calls at night when I'm sleeping; I saw it on my bill --976-PUPPY") coalescing with the chirping of backyard birds as dusk descends on chez Bullock. I ask what her plans are for her gardens. "All plants that come here die," she says. "That's why everything the nursery sells me looks like a cactus."
Dead plants or not, this whole place seems like a good, peaceful place to retreat to when the vicissitudes of show biz threaten to get to you. "Hollywood turns on actors every day," she says. "People think you're doing really well because you're appearing in movies on a regular basis, but they have no idea how often somebody doesn't like your work and turns you away. The upside to the rejection is that it makes you work harder and try to prove them wrong. It's good for me, though it can be heartless sometimes." Bullock sighs with resignation, then continues, "But children are mean and high school is a tough place to grow up. That's what Hollywood is -- a big high school. Who's gonna be the prom queen? I see myself as the attendant, the one who gets picked for the court but never the homecoming queen. I am standing in the rain, wearing my long dress, saying, 'Get me out of here, my heels are sinking into the mud.'"
Bullock laughs at her own words. After all, maybe it's not quite that bad--they're talking about a sequel to Speed. And, well, these days at least it's her very own mud.
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Michael Kaplan interviewed Paul Rudnick for the November 1993 Movieline.