Sandra Bullock Is Done Being Embarrassed About the Movies She Loves

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Four years after “The Lost City”, Sandra Bullock returns to the role critics once tore apart, in conversation with her closest friend in the business.

Sandra Bullock has not been in a movie since 2022’s The Lost City. For four years, the closest anyone got to a new show from her was a rewatch. That changes with Practical Magic 2, and to mark the return, Bullock sat for reply sources September 2026 cover story, in conversation not with a staff writer but with her longtime friend Jennifer Aniston, who conducted the interview herself and is credited as its author. It published September 8.

Aniston teased her for the gap, joking that four years off made it feel like Bullock had been living in a cave. Bullock played along, describing herself as arriving covered in cobwebs and barnacles. The bit gets at something true about how the industry treats absence: a few years off the screen, even by choice, tends to get read as a disappear that needs explain. Bullock has an explanation. It just took a while to get to theaters.

 

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The cover was shot by Szilveszter Mako and styled by Lisa Jarvis, and shows Bullock in a green sitting room with a black cat perched on the mantle, dressed in a Loewe coat and dress with Bvlgari earrings and a matching necklace. It’s a witchy, autumnal set that leans into the film’s own view lang  without showing a single frame of it.

The story’s interior spreads move through a run of other designer pieces: Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, worn twice; Bottega Veneta, also twice, once in a fur trimmed coat surrounded by black cat cutouts and again seated in front of a black and white house sketch; Hodakova; a Calvin Klein Collection dress; Jacquemus; and Schiaparelli shoes. Wolfordtights and Bvlgari jewelry recur across nearly every look, threading the individual images together.

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When Practical Magic opened in 1998, it did not land. Bullock told Aniston the reviews were scathing enough that she carried real shame about it for years, privately deciding she had done something wrong and would not repeat the mistake. Then something happened that has become a familiar pattern for movies from that decade: mothers who saw it in theaters started showing it to their daughters, those daughters grew up and passed it along again, and social media gave all of them a place to say why they loved it. The reputation flipped from flop to fixture without the movie itself changing at all.

The idea for a sequel came to Bullock at home in New York, sitting in a small sunroom off her kitchen. She called her longtime producing partner Denise Di Novi with a condition: it would only work if the new film let the Owens women address what the first one couldn’t, including how the world talks about the daughters who inherit the family’s curse. Di Novi told her that condition was already met. Alice Hoffman, who wrote the original novel, had published a follow-up years earlier, reportedly The Book of Magic. Bullock said she hadn’t known it existed.

From that phone call to a finished film took roughly five years by Bullock’s account, which tracks with Warner Bros.’ first public confirmation of the project back in mid-2024. Susanne Bier directs the sequel, and Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the 1998 film, returns for the script.

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Nicole Kidman is back too, reprising Gillian Owens opposite Bullock’s Sally. Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest also return as the aunts who raised them. Bullock told Aniston that before shooting began, the original cast got on a video call just to reconnect, and hearing Wiest’s voice again was enough to set the whole group off. Joey King, Lee Pace, and Maisie Williams join the cast for the sequel, expanding the story to a new gen of the Owens family.

Bullock said she and Kidman had mostly crossed paths at red carpet events in the years between films, brief and, by her own admission, nerve-wracking encounters rather than real hangouts. Getting back on set together after decades apart felt less like reuniting with a costar, she said, and more like coming home.

Warner Bros. has set Practical Magic 2 for a wide theatrical release on September 18, 2026, a date the studio confirmed directly through a Bullock and Kidman voiceover posted to its own social accounts back in May 2025. A handful of ticketing sites list an earlier date the same week; Warner Bros.’ own announcement is the better sourced figure.

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Bullock’s career hasn’t moved in a straight line, and she was direct with Aniston about the one deliberate turn in it. After facing criticism for making too many romantic comedies early on, she took a role in Crash, the 2004 ensemble drama, specifically to prove she could do something else. She called it a genius film and said it was the one time she consciously steered her own career rather than taking whatever came next, which she said is closer to how most working actors actually operate.

She singled out Two Weeks Notice, her 2002 comedy opposite Hugh Grant, as her favorite set experience, mostly because she laughed so hard and so often that the film’s makeup artist ran out of patience touching up her tears between takes. She also brought up Infamous, a 2006 film in which she played Harper Lee, and said she felt it never got its due because a second, higher profile film about Truman Capote came out around the same time. Gravity came up too, less as a career highlight than as a film that happened to line up with one of the hardest stretches of her life, shot largely alone and in near silence while she was raising Louis as an infant and working through a difficult period privately.

Both women agreed that comedies, romantic ones especially, get dismissed by the industry as easy even though they aren’t, and that audiences are circling back to them anyway. Aniston said she had recently rewatched old bloopers from Two Weeks Notice on social media and been reminded how much straightforward joy those movies used to deliver. Bullock’s read on the moment was simple: audiences are done pretending they don’t want it.

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Practical Magic 2 gave Bullock a reason to dig into history she said she had absorbed without ever examining closely. It started with a question from her daughter: why are women in the story called witches while men with the same ability are called warlocks. Bullock’s answer to Aniston was that witch carries a built-in negative charge that warlock doesn’t, and that the imbalance isn’t incidental.

Researching the script pushed her further. She told Aniston that women were historically persecuted for teaching each other to read and for sharing home remedies, treated as dangerous simply for becoming educated together. She traced one specific, stranger example back to an old practical reality: some historic establishments had no restrooms for women at all, so when the need arose, women left in groups and walked to a field after dark, together, for safety. Bullock said that’s her working theory for why women still tend to go to the bathroom in packs long after the original reason stopped applying.

It’s the kind of detail that won’t make it into a trailer, but it explains, more than plot specifics do, why Bullock describes this sequel as necessary rather than nostalgic. The first film buried its politics under cocktails and comedy. The second one, by her account, gets to say the thing directly.

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Bullock has two children, Louis and Laila, both adopted. She described Practical Magic 2 as something close to a personal apology aimed at her 12-year-old daughter, who she said reminds her constantly of Kylie, the character Joey King plays in the new film. Bullock called her daughter the fire of the family, someone who has never doubted her own ability to survive anything, in contrast to what Bullock described as her own more fearful nature.

That contrast sat at the center of how Bullock talked about parenting. She told Aniston she wants to help her daughter stay as brave as she already is without projecting her own anxieties onto her, a balance she admitted she doesn’t always strike. Both of her kids have small, unbilled cameos in the finished film, appearances she said she’s looking forward to pointing out to them, since neither child knows exactly where their scenes landed in the final cut.

Louis, meanwhile, is 16, old enough that Bullock and Aniston spent part of the conversation trading notes on the practical reality of an oldest child approaching the point of leaving home. Bullock said the prospect scares her more than any role she’s taken this year.

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Bullock’s relationship with privacy goes back further than either of her children. She told Aniston she has been guarded since she was young, long before fame made it a professional necessity, and that the impulse only sharpened once she became a parent.

The clearest example she gave dates to 2010. After her split from then husband Jesse James became public, paparazzi interest in her newborn son Louis spiked overnight. Bullock’s solution, as she described it to Aniston, was to zip her infant, still strapped into his car seat, inside a hockey duffel bag and carry him out of the house as though she were hauling sports equipment rather than a baby.

Asked how she’s managed to protect what’s hers for this long, Bullock didn’t credit a strategy so much as the people around her. “You know, because you’re one of my protectors,” she told Aniston, naming her as part of the small circle she trusts completely. She added that real exposure doesn’t come from being famous. It comes from the people close enough to sell what they know, something she said has happened to her recently, and it broke her heart.

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Bullock told Aniston she doesn’t mind being interviewed and rarely regrets doing them in the moment. What she can’t stand, she said, is the posing that comes with a press tour, joking that she’ll never carry herself with the ease of someone like Zendaya and comparing herself instead to Zendaya’s shoe polisher. The harder part, she said, is sarcasm: she makes jokes when she’s nervous, and jokes don’t always survive being printed without the tone that made them jokes in the first place, which has left her apologizing for things she said in jest more than once.

Aniston described wrestling with the same instinct, comparing her own habit of over-protecting her private life to wrapping herself in bubble wrap, to the point of wondering whether she’s still fully living. Neither woman claimed to have solved it. Both described it as an ongoing negotiation between wanting to promote the work and wanting to keep the rest of it for themselves.

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Bullock and Aniston’s friendship predates either woman’s most recent decade of work. Bullock traced it back to a party at Gwyneth Paltrow‘s house, where the two sat together and, by Bullock’s account, didn’t talk to anyone else all night. At one point in their history, the two dated the same man, actor Tate Donovan, a detail both women raised as evidence of how long they’ve actually known each other, rather than as anything more complicated.

The conversation wandered, as conversations between old friends do, through Bullock’s hair (she credited Aniston’s haircare line, LolaVie, with saving her from what she called two separate bouts of stress related hair loss), the pair’s shared discomfort with the posing and public performance that come with promoting a movie, and a running debate over what actually determines whether an actor’s career lasts. Bullock’s answer leaned toward hard work and being someone people want on a set. Aniston pushed back, insisting talent was the real explanation and that there was no one else quite like Bullock.

For now, there is no second sequel in motion and no announced next project. Bullock said her rule going forward is that any film has to shoot close to home in Los Angeles, with travel reserved for the summer, when her kids are out of school. Practical Magic 2 opens in theaters September 18, 2026.