Sandra Bullock is breaking her silence on the death of her partner, Bryan Randall, who passed away in 2023 following his battle with ALS.
During a recent episode of the SmartLess podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, Bullock revealed that Randall asked her to keep his diagnosis a secret.
“He asked me not to share. I know why he asked me not to,” she said.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a rare neurodegenerative disease that progressively paralyzes a person as a result of nerve cell death in the brain and spinal cord, according to the ALS Society of Canada. ALS patients will lose the ability to walk, talk, eat, swallow and eventually breathe. There is no cure.
The Practical Magic 2 actor said that the secrecy “isolated me in the process.”
“My sister was the only one who knew for a while,” she said. “At first I go, ‘Oh, I can handle that. I can be quiet.'”
Bullock said that she started grieving Randall, whom she dated for eight years, “four years before he passed.”
“My person left a lot earlier than the body left,” the 62-year-old actor continued. “I don’t think I ever dealt with that until after he passed, because you’re just on this treadmill, you know?”
Bullock called ALS “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, these grips, these breath tests, all these things,” she said.
“You have to quietly plan. And I’m a very good planner with illness,” Bullock said, before discussing that her father had “horrible accidents” and her mother had cancer.
The Bird Box actor met Randall when he was hired to photograph Bullock’s son Louis’ birthday in 2015. The couple was co-parenting their three children — Bullock’s adopted son and daughter, and Randall’s daughter from a previous relationship.
She said that she worked with child therapists to help her two children, Laila and Louis, who were “completely aware” of Randall’s diagnosis.
“They could see, they have eyes. They are very, very astute kids,” she added. “Very astute because they not only see the physical change, there’s a behaviour that changes in all of us.”
When she was asked why it was important to keep the diagnosis a secret to others, Bullock said, “You’d have to ask Bryan, but I think, where he was in his journey both physically and mentally.”