George Clooney Once Stopped His Pranks for Sandra Bullock

George Clooney has a major habit of pranking his co-stars on film sets. But he and Sandra Bullock decided to call a temporary truce for the sake of their movie.

George Clooney avoided pranking Sandra Bullock in ‘Gravity’

Some of Clooney’s on-set prank victims have included the likes of his co-stars Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. And although most are good sports about the star’s humor, Bullock asserted there was little time to fool around on Gravity. The sci-fi feature was one of Bullock’s and Clooney’s most daring projects, with the two playing a pair of astronauts stranded in deep space. The movie rested heavily on Bullock’s shoulders, so the Oscar-winner already felt more pressure than she usually experienced doing her films.

“There was a truce,” Bullock once told Collider. “This film was so hard. Pranks had no place. There was never down time. How are you going to prank someone who’s hanging from a scaffolding with 12 wires, rigged up all day, and so we. So, we had a truce at the very get-go because that just wasn’t the appropriate place to prank someone.”

It helped that Bullock and Clooney were already close friends far before working together on Gravity.

“We’ve known each other long before either one of us had a career,” Bullock said. “We’re part of a close group of friends, so I’ve known George before the world knew ‘handsome George.’ And the same person he was then, is the exact same person he is now. He’s a man who loves film, and a man who loves being part of a group and working and supporting. He’s the ultimate team worker. You never know that you’re dealing with someone who’s had the level of success that he has because all he cares about is being at the table, at the beginning of a film and reading the script. He says, ‘How can I help?’ He’s just the same person I knew, all those years ago when our hair was dark and curly.”

George Clooney stayed by Sandra Bullock’s side to provide support

Clooney’s presence wasn’t always needed on the set of Gravity. There were a few sequences where Bullock had to act without her onscreen partner by her side for support. But even when Clooney was off the clock, he stayed on set behind the scenes so Bullock wouldn’t feel overwhelmed.

“There was a point in which there were so many scenes with Sandra alone, and he was so concerned,” director Alfonso Cuaron said. “He could have just done his job and left, but George noticed that Sandy and I were struggle with a couple of scenes because we were discussing these scenes, all the time, and doing little rewrites, in terms of the dialogue and how to best convey the emotions that we wanted to convey. Suddenly, out of the blue, he offered to help. Actually, one of my favorite scenes, he rewrote, and it was just out of the blue. He said, ‘Hey, for what it’s worth, here’s this. Delete it, or use it.’And it was great.”

Bullock felt a lot of much-needed relief with Clooney being there. She was able to divide the massive weight of Gravity between herself and her co-star, which she felt was overlooked by some.

“So, I never once thought, ‘I’m the only person.’ There was George, who’s a vital part of this film. He represents life and this outlook on living that, if you don’t have that, this film could not exist. So, I never thought of it until I started doing press and everybody was freaking me out and going, ‘How do you feel that this rests on you?’ I was like, ‘How is that now my problem?’ I didn’t write this or produce it or come up with the cockamamie idea to make a space movie.’ I still don’t think about it because I feel like I’m third or fourth on the list of characters, with the story, the emotional visuals, the sound and the experience of what they’ve created,” she said in a separate Collider interview.