Sandra Bullock broke her silence on the death of her longtime partner, Bryan Randall, who lost his battle with ALS in 2023.
Bullock, 62, dialed in to the “SmartLess” podcast from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she was watching her kids fish nearby. The “Speed” actress admitted she felt “safe” sharing her story with the group, nearly three years after Randall died.
While Bullock previously spoke about their relationship during a 2021 episode, she confessed that her head wasn’t completely there at the time “because of the whole Bryan thing,” she said. “I don’t remember anything.”
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“It’s just horrible. Where I sit now, what I have now, I would not have to share had I not gone through that,” Bullock said. “I would not ever want to go through it again, though you never know life is like… life is tricky. I wasn’t allowed to speak about it. That was the request, and I honored it.”
When asked about keeping his diagnosis a secret, Bullock said, “Yes, he asked me not to share.”
“I know why he asked me not to… it isolated me in the process and plus the entire world was locked in with the pandemic,” she said. “He was ill for half of our relationship and the diagnosis came almost at the same time with the cloak of the pandemic.”
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“So as the pandemic came down, and I have a child with severe asthma – I was panicking. Then, we were trying to navigate all the tests, because with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis people – you don’t go, ‘Oh you have these symptoms, you have ALS.’ It is literally like the process of elimination over the course of a year, and somewhere you keep going back, and they give you all these milestones these things to do … because ALS appears in different ways.”
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is named after the former New York Yankee great who was forced to retire in 1939 due to the debilitating disease and after playing for the team 17 seasons. Gehrig retired at the age of 36 and died two years later.
“His was not hereditary, which I think is a huge sigh of relief, but it was about a year and some of watching it to see what it was,” Bullock remembered. “It could have been this, it could have been this, but what I saw, I knew.”
Bullock noted a history with caregiving, albeit minimally, as she witnessed her parents suffer from myriad illnesses.
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“I’m a very good planner with illness because my father was ill and had horrible accidents and my mother had cancer – I feel like I’m very comfortable in a setting where someone is ill. It doesn’t scare me, not the illness itself. It doesn’t scare me. I can see and be around just about anything.”
“But I had two young kids that were navigating, especially a little girl who saw him as a father figure. So with COVID, and all of that, and being asked not to talk.”
She added, “I wasn’t even allowed to tell Amanda [Anka] (Jason Bateman’s wife), I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody. My sister was the only one who knew for a while.”
The “Miss Congeniality” actress was “so scared that I’d get in trouble for speaking” about Randall’s diagnosis.
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“Because of my job, it’s kind of like Sally Owens,” she said, referring to her “Practical Magic” character. “I have a curse. I walk with this curse that knowledge is payment – for somebody, it is information that is valuable and, so that’s why I keep very isolated, because I don’t want to harm others because of what I do.”
Bullock admitted that “not talking for a while was good,” but the physical illness coupled with “the mental health aspect” created a “trifecta that was pretty dark.”
She worked with child therapists to help guide her two kids, Laila and Louis, who were “completely aware” of Randall’s diagnosis as he battled ALS in secrecy from their home.
“They could see, they have eyes. They are very, very astute kids,” she said. “Very astute because they not only see the physical change, there’s a behavior that changes in all of us. I’m hyper-vigilant, I became manic in my vigilance. I had to not only make sure he was OK, I had to make sure we could keep the nurses.”
She added, “The understanding that I now have of caregiving … I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know who to call. Then there’s pain management.”
When asked why it was so important to keep his secret, Bullock said, “You’d have to ask Bryan, but I think, where he was in his journey both physically and mentally. I started grieving Bryan four years before he passed. Something in me said, start the grieving now because I knew I would be the caregiver.”
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“The selfish part of me, my person left a lot earlier than the body left, and I had to… I don’t think I ever dealt with that until after he passed because you’re just on this treadmill,” she said.
“The thing with my journey with Bryan is that I didn’t stop feeling guilt as a mother with my kids until I’d say about a year ago. There’s things I didn’t process.”
Randall died on Aug. 5, 2023. He was 57.
“It is with great sadness that we share that on August 5th Bryan Randall passed away peacefully after a 3 year battle with ALS,” his family said in a statement at the time.
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“Bryan chose early to keep his journey with ALS private and those of us who cared for him did our best to honor his request. We are immensely grateful to the tireless doctors who navigated the landscape of this illness with us and to the astounding nurses who became our roommates, often sacrificing their own families to be with ours. At this time we ask for privacy to grieve and to come to terms with the impossibility of saying goodbye to Bryan.”
Bullock and Randall, who was a photographer, had been dating since 2015. According to People magazine, the pair first met when he was hired to take pictures during the birthday party for her son, Louis, that January.
