We are a little over a month from the release of Ocean’s 8 (finally!) so promotion is in high gear. Rihanna covers Vogue this month, and Sandra Bullock is in InStyle, with a wide-ranging (if not very insightful) interview.
The thing with reading a Sandra Bullock interview is that, as a gossip connoisseur, it’s not the most exciting because she is normal. You know you aren’t going to eye-roll because she doesn’t offer up the regular celebrity platitudes or advice. She engages like a person who actually spends time in the real world – she even prefaces a mention of Jennifer Aniston with a self-effacing comment about name dropping. But she is Sandra Bullock, she is the name that gets dropped, not the name that needs to drop, you know?
Sandra is open enough about her hot photographer boyfriend, Randall, making it clear that he has a solid relationship with her children. She talks about #MeToo and Time’s Up, being sure to bring up the larger purpose of organization – to help women across various fields fight for workplace safety and pay parity. There’s nothing here about Sandra Bullock that you won’t like, not her crack about George Clooney’s Casamigos windfall or even the line she draws for tabloids (her children). Because really, we kind of forget now, but Sandra went through it with the tabloids because of her ex-husband. And she had a new baby at home at the time that she was trying to shield from attention. Through that whole debacle, she didn’t blame the media or magazines, and she didn’t blame the culture of celebrity gossip. She acknowledged and left it behind, and everyone else has, too.
Sandra keeps it simple and she keeps it moving. She comes to the interview prepared with a Prince anecdote (he willfully ignored her, because he was Prince) and invites them into her home to see her sexy dance room with expensive chair (her biggest-ever splurge). She talks about having a bunch of unworn dresses in her closet and a group of non-famous girlfriends. She’s still Sandy, reliable and relatable but never trying too hard. Because, unlike most of her contemporaries, Sandra isn’t selling us movie stardom with a side of something else (like a cookbook or clothing line or decorative pillows). She has remained a true movie star, unmoved and untouched by the rise of lifestyle brands.
The only insight Sandra gives us into her future is that she might join social media. She said she is “aware” of what goes on and is considering it because she wants to know what her kids will be doing in a few years. And she has the perfect outlet for it: Sandra loves to renovate homes. She is big on design and architecture and is constantly working on a big project – this is perfect for Instagram.
And with any mention of architecture, I have to bring up Brad Pitt. (It’s the law – he really does have a lock on that image when it comes to celebrities.) Look, if she wasn’t in a happy relationship and he wasn’t maybe-dealing with a professor, would I Gossip Genie them? Probably not, because Sandra is so far from a life of scrutiny, and purposefully so. It would be futile to Gossip Genie them. Some bottom-dwelling tabloids already tried. Never going to happen. Right? But it is kind of unbelievable they have never dated. They could double with George and Amal. OK sorry, I’ll stop now.
