Sandra scores a bullseye

10 April 2012

Try as she might, Sandra Bullock just can't seem to change her wholesome image.

Whenever she tries, as she did in last year's 28 Days by playing an alcoholic writer forced into rehab, audiences stay away in droves. But cast her as a sweet, winsome, girl-next-door type, as in While You Were Sleeping or Hope Floats, and the film is a success.

It's as if the memory of her breezy breakthrough performance in 1993's Speed has fixed her in people's minds as the star who specialises in being nice.

But there's something to be said for giving the public what they want - and so Bullock is back with Miss Congeniality, an amiable comedy that's the perfect vehicle for her combination of charm and determination.

Playing an FBI agent who has to go undercover as a contestant at the Miss America beauty pageant, she's transformed from a mono-browed, kick-boxing tomboy into a credible, but nice, beauty queen by Michael Caine's camp expert in etiquette and deportment.

Bullock is as likeable as ever in a role that highlights the precise reasons why she appeals to audiences: she's not so sexy that she alienates women, but she's hot enough to keep the boyfriends interested and she has a genuine gift for physical comedy.

Unsurprisingly, the film has quickly pushed past the $100 million mark at the US box office. That's welcome news for Bullock, who pulls down a handy $12 million a movie but hasn't had a hit since 1999's Forces Of Nature.

Not that she takes it personally when her films flop. 'Why should I?' says Bullock, who's taking a snack break on the Austin, Texas, set of Miss Congeniality. 'There are 350 people responsible for making a film. I did my work and I know how hard I work. I know it comes down on me, because it's fun to write about that in the press. You're not going to go, "Well, the gaffer didn't do the lighting right or the director didn't do that right" - we're all in it together.'

Dressed down in jeans and a baggy top, the 36-year-old strives hard to come across as unaffected and down-to-earth, and mostly she succeeds.

As Michael Caine points out, 'You never hear a bad word said about Sandra,' and she certainly isn't the type to retreat to her trailer or throw a tantrum on set. In fact, she's more likely to be the one jumping out of a cake in a bikini to celebrate the director's birthday, as she did on A Time To Kill.

She has personal experience of competing in a beauty pageant. 'When I was in college I needed money and so some of the guys in the dance department said, "We're going to put you in the Tobacco Queen Festival." I went to college in North Carolina, which is tobacco country. It was very much like Educating Rita: they told me I walked like a linebacker, so they taught me how to walk properly. I lost and my poor grandmother was sitting in the audience going, "What is she doing?"'

What she really needed was to learn the tricks of the trade, which she has done for Miss Congeniality. 'You use hairspray to keep the bathing suit down and I've learned a lot about enhancing the breasts.' So how do you do that? 'Well, you get Michael Caine's hands inside pulling them up,' giggles Bullock. 'No, there's taping, there's these gels, there are so many tricks that I wish I'd known about when I was growing up.'

Her Eliza Doolittle-like transformation from butch agent to beauty queen is the highlight of the film, but it means that she looks shocking for its opening 20 minutes. 'I'm tomboy-ish in a lot of my life, but this was all about forgetting how to sit like a girl, act like a girl, how to communicate like a girl, so I practised losing my femininity for three months. We said, "What if I've never used a product, a tweezer, ever in my life?"'

Surely every woman knows about beauty aids? 'Not necessarily,' insists Bullock. 'I look at my picture in high school and wonder why I didn't pick up a tweezer. It's just how you live. My family wasn't about fashion, we didn't have one fashion magazine in our house, so I wasn't raised with the dos and don'ts of hair colouring and stuff like that. Basically, in high school I had almost a mono-brow and thick, wavy Janis Joplin hair.'

Brought up between Europe, where her German mum toured as an opera singer, and the suburbs of Washington DC, Bullock says she's still uncomfortable with having to dress up for awards ceremonies and industry parties.

'I feel stiff and I feel false. Also I'm not a stand-up straight person - I slouch. I feel sexier when I don't have any make-up on. That's why I don't go anywhere, because there's so much pressure on what designer you're wearing and how you look.'

Instead, she prefers to stay at home in Austin. Is that why Miss Congeniality, which she's also producing, is shooting there? 'I didn't want to go to Las Vegas (the spiritual home of beauty pageants) because you lose half your crew. They go gambling and lose all their money and divorces happen. It's horrible. But Austin is home and at this time in my life I didn't want to leave. I need to stay in one place for a while.'

That might be because Austin is also where her boyfriend, musician Bob Schneider, lives. Although Bullock will ramble at length on almost any subject, she's always been tight-lipped when it comes to her relationships.

She only admitted to dating Matthew McConaughey (who also lives in Austin) after they'd split up - and true to form she's saying nothing about Schneider, who's a face on the thriving Austin music scene but hasn't dented the national charts yet.

Miss Congeniality presents a surprisingly benign picture of the world of beauty pageants. Doesn't Bullock think they're degrading for women? 'No. Do you think a woman on a cover of a magazine is degrading? Do you think being an actress is degrading? It's kind of the same thing. I don't think the women feel it's degrading. I mean, Miss USA wins $30,000 worth of college scholarships and then they have a possible job when they get out.'

Being controversial though, is not the Bullock way and, instead of slagging off beauty queens, she'd rather talk up the way the women in the film work together. In part, that's because she's recently re-discovered the joys of female bonding. 'For a long time most of my friends were male,' she explains. 'I think it was a period I was going through, I wasn't very comfortable with myself. But I got to a point where I missed the friendships I had when I was at high school. Now I'm most comfortable with people who are comfortable with both men and women.'

Now that she's back in favour at the box office, she won't be drifting too far from the formula that made her a star. She'll next be seen in Exactly 3:30, another romantic comedy, but she claims that she's much more confident about her abilities than ever before.

'I'm not as inhibited and intimidated as I was. I'll do anything now and I can't wait till I'm 60 to see what I'll be doing then. I don't really watch my films after I've done them, but I'm really proud of myself,' states Bullock. 'You know, that I went and did that.'

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