Sandra Bullock is speaking out for the first time on the death of her partner Bryan Randall, who died in 2023 after a battle with ALS.
For half of the eight years they were together, Randall was deteriorating, and while he asked her to keep his diagnosis under wraps, doing so proved extremely isolating, Bullock told friends Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes on the three co-hosts’ latest “Smartless” podcast episode.
“I wasn’t allowed to speak about it. That was the request, and I honored it,” Bullock said, according to a subscriber-only clip obtained by TMZ.
“I know why he asked me not to,” she continued, but noted, “It isolated me in the process.”
That isolation was compounded because he was diagnosed just as the country locked down at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bullock said. She told only her sister, Gesine Bullock-Prado, at first. Eventually she confided in pals Jennifer Aniston and Arnett’s wife, Amanda Anka.
Like most people afflicted with the devastating and invariably fatal amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Randall was diagnosed after a year of neurological testing that amounted to a “process of elimination,” Bullock said.
Having nursed both her father and mother through major illnesses before their deaths, “The Blind Side” Oscar winner had no illusions about the caregiving aspect and was unphased at the prospect of illness itself.
“I can see and be around just about anything,” Bullock said, according to People. “But I had two young kids that were navigating it, especially a little girl who saw [Randall] as a father figure.”
Those kids are Louis and Laila, the children she adopted before meeting Randall, a photographer, in 2015. She is also stepmother to Skylar, 32, Randall’s daughter from a previous relationship.
Bullock and Randall met when she hired him to photograph Louis’s fifth birthday party, and they were soon spotted together just about everywhere. By the end of the year they seemed inseparable.
The person whom Bullock described as “the love of my life” died on Aug. 5, 2023, at age 57, his family announced at the time.