In Miss Congeniality and its early aughts sequel, Sandra Bullock played an FBI agent going undercover at a beauty pageant. Needless to say, her character was not used to all the upkeep beauty queens must go through. As it turns out, Bullock herself did not love the real-life transformation she had to go through to pull off playing Gracie Hart, who was playing Gracie Lou Freebush.
In a resurfaced video that originally had been timed for the release of Miss Congeniality in 2000, Ms. Bullock called all of the upkeep so “aggravating.” In the clip from what would become one of Sandra Bullock’s most iconic roles, ET spoke with a younger Sandra Bullock about her soon-to-be iconic role. Take a look.
At the time, Bullock said the role was really outside the realm of the type of projects she had been offered throughout her career. Then she said something I found absolutely astonishing: She never considered herself to be one of the more attractive women in Hollywood. (Girl, what?)
Article continues belowI didn’t read a lot of scripts for women that had that sort of humor. It’s always like, ‘We’re supposed to keep it together and look relatively attractive.’ I never was the most attractive in the first place. You could always make somebody look it, but I’ve always done roles that were never the beauty queen before. So, I said, ‘This is sort of nice because it takes the person from one end to the other end.’
She was very earnest when she said this. While she went on to star as a very put-together woman in The Proposal and has landed a wide swathe of types of roles throughout her career –I’m thinking about the difference between Hope Floats and Bird Box here – she really took Miss Congeniality to raise awareness about what women go through. She went on to joke about the “plucking,” but in all seriousness, she made a good point:
It shows the men what women really go through and it shows the women what they really don’t have to go through. At the end of this I said, ‘You know what? I want girls to leave and go, “We don’t really need to pluck that much do we?”’
Of course, years later, she kind of got her wish. Thin eyebrows are definitely out. A lot of women don’t even (regularly if at all) shave their armpits and legs these days, but I’d argue these beauty regimens have simply been replaced by things like sunscreen routines, contouring, botox, fillers and other types of beauty strategies, including the infamous penis facial Bullock’s even talked about.
It’s hard for me to believe it’s been 26 years since Miss Congeniality first hit theaters and 21 years since the sequel came out. (A sequel Miss Bullock regrets.) There were babies born that last year that doubtless went bar-hopping for their 21st birthday this year. A lot has happened in society during this time, and a lot of that is reflected in the larger swathe of roles and types of roles women get in the industry. Though there’s yet work to be done.
In related news, though, we only recently found out Hugh Jackman tried out for Miss Congeniality, so it’s clear the great early 2000s movie is one that still has resonance, today.
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