Sandra Bullock is making a comeback. It’s been three years since the Oscar-winner’s last film — 2018’s Bird Box — but the first trailer has dropped for her next collaboration with Netflix, The Unforgivable, and it’s safe to say that America’s Sweetheart is playing against type. Bullock stars as Grace, an ex-con who is released after a lengthy prison stay for a violent crime. As she struggles to reacclimate to society, she searches for the little sister that she was protecting the night she was arrested.
Bullock is unrecognizable in the trailer, and she appears to be gunning for her second Academy Award. The Unforgivable also stars Viola Davis, Jon Bernthal, and Vincent D’Onofrio. Netflix is using a hybrid release model with the upcoming drama, which will be in select theaters on Nov. 24 and on the streaming service on Dec. 10.
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Bullock is also a producer on the film, and she opened up to Entertainment Weekly about her character’s journey. “My character is someone who has been incarcerated for 20 years for a pretty heinous crime [and] gets out,” Bullock explained. “There are several people whose lives she affected by this crime she committed, and there’s a lot of hatred and anger and bitterness and sorrow associated with her release. She wants to find this one person, the only family she had when she went in, and you keep asking yourself, ‘Why can’t you let it go? This family member was traumatized by your actions — let it go! Stop harming these people all over again.’”
“Finding out the background to the story of why she did what she did is sort of the whodunnit of this,” Bullock said. “It’s a murder mystery within a very complex character drama.” Bullock also praised her co-stars, calling working with that level of talent “ridiculous and selfishly beneficial.”
“I don’t care where you think you are on the level of talent on your acting scale, if you place yourself opposite those who are far better than you, they will only elevate you. I was so scared,” she admitted. “I was basically making a silent film for my character, and I was like, ‘If I fail with my emotional inner life, we’ve lost the storytelling.’ But I would get opposite these tremendous human beings and you just go ‘thank you’ to be opposite talent like that. Everybody dreams about it. And then here we had it.” The Unforgivable is out in select theaters on Nov. 24 and available on Netflix Dec. 10.
