Sandra Bullock is opening up about her lifelong instinct toward privacy and the friends who've helped her guard it, in a candid new conversation with longtime friend Jennifer Aniston. For Interview magazine's September 2026 cover story, when Aniston asked how Bullock protects the version of herself that belongs only to the people close to her, Bullock credited her directly. "You know, because you're one of my protectors.

I've been insanely private since I was a little kid. I drove my mother crazy. That's just inherently who I am."  She added that being part of a trusted circle brings her real joy.  "I love being in a safe group.

Nothing makes me happier than coming to your house and hanging with everybody, but then you have situations where people take your privacy and sell it. But I love telling stories and it's our job to go out there and represent. And once I get out there, I have a blast." Aniston noted that the public-facing parts of the job, red carpets and posing for cameras, tend to be the hardest, a sentiment Bullock echoed with a joke about her own limits.

"I'm actually fine with the interviews. I want to be Zendaya, but I will never be Zendaya." The conversation touched on Bullock's return to the spotlight with Practical Magic 2, her first film since 2022's The Lost City, as well as themes of motherhood and navigating an industry that's shifted considerably since both women broke out in the mid-1990s.  Bullock has previously credited Aniston and a small group of close friends, including her sister Gesine Bullock-Prado and Jason Bateman's wife, Amanda Anka, with supporting her through difficult periods, including confiding in them about her late partner Bryan Randall's ALS diagnosis years before his death in August 2023.  "I love being in a safe group," she reiterated to Aniston.