Sandra Bullock Was Really Blindfolded During The Filming Of Bird Box
In the late days of 2018, the world was briefly gripped by an obsession with Susanne Bier's post-apocalypse thriller "Bird Box," starring Sandra Bullock. The film was as oblique as it was bleak, featuring an end-of-the-world scenario that was never quite explained. It seemed that some sort of unseen demonic entity has arrived on Earth for unknown purposes. The mostly-invisible entity would briefly appear in front of individuals, and force them to go insane and take their own lives. It was posited that the entity may be a demon, and it's been compared to evil spirits from throughout religious history, called a Surgat, a Huli Jing, or the demon Aka Manah from Zoroastrian mythology. In order to avoid looking at the entity, Malorie, the Bullock character, takes to wearing a blindfold at all times.
As the world falls apart, Malorie often runs afoul of un-blindfolded survivors who claim that the insanity demons are ultimately good for you. Eventually, she and two unnamed children will have to seek refuge in the woods. The trio has to traverse a dangerous landscape blindfolded, carrying birds that will chirp if a demon is nearby.
The film itself only received warm reviews, but it inspired a brief pop trend of TikTok users putting on blindfolds and attempting to accomplish mundane household tasks. The Bird Box Challenge, it seems, fizzled out as quickly as it came into being.
It seems that the challenge was more accurate than some of its participants might have known. While filming "Bird Box," Bullock actually played out her scenes with a real blindfold on. If Bullock looked like she couldn't see, it was because she actually couldn't. Director Bier talked with the BBC about filming "Bird Box" back in 2018 and recalled how nervous she felt for her star.
Staying blind
According to Bier, it was her star's idea to use a real blindfold. Bullock could have easily been outfitted with a translucent blindfold that would have allowed the actress to see, but she was hellbent on authenticity. Luckily, Bullock had hired a coach trained in helping blind people and was able to find her way relatively well. Bier, though, was still a little concerned and said that Bullock even fell over a few times during filming. The director said:
"I had a completely dedicated, crazily diligent actor — I said 'Can we just make holes in the blindfold?' and she said 'No way, no way'. [...] I kept hoping she wouldn't bump into the camera."
In a separate interview with Deadline, Bier and Bullock further discussed the filming process and the difficulty of working blindfolded. Bullock said she wasn't so concerned with being unable to see as she was nervous about removing a vital part of her acting instrument. Without one's eyes, a great deal of performance is cut off. The actress said:
"What's the easiest way as an actor to show how you're feeling on camera? It's your eyes. And you realize when that's taken away you don't know how to act."
For Reuters, Bullock elucidated, saying that she felt her performance was ultimately better even without her eyes. To quote:
"I went 'Oh my God, it's because I don't have my tools of expression as an actor' ... But I think in the end ...it helped give a really jagged feeling to those scenes rather than if I had holes cut in my blindfold and I could see and I was pretending to stumble and be blind."
A sequel to "Bird Box" called "Bird Box Barcelona" is coming to Netflix on July 14, 2023.