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?”
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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.
“It doesn’t scare me — not the illness itself, it doesn’t scare me. I can see and be around just about anything. But I had two young kids that were navigating it, especially a little girl who saw [Randall] as a father figure,” the Miss Congeniality actor said.
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.”
Randall died on Aug. 5, 2023, at the age of 57.
Randall’s family announced his death in a statement, saying, “It is with great sadness that we share that on Aug. 5, Bryan Randall passed away peacefully after a three-year battle with ALS.”
“Bryan chose early to keep his journey with ALS private and those of us who cared for him did our best to honor his request,” the statement added.
“We are immensely grateful to the tireless doctors who navigated the landscape of this illness with us and to the astounding nurses who became our roommates, often sacrificing their own families to be with ours,” the statement continued. “At this time we ask for privacy to grieve and to come to terms with the impossibility of saying goodbye to Bryan.”
The statement was signed, “His Loving Family.”
Bullock’s sister, Gesine Bullock-Prado, praised the Oscar-winning actor for being a caretaker to Randall.
“ALS is a cruel disease but there is some comfort in knowing he had the best of caretakers in my amazing sister and the band of nurses she assembled who helped her look after him in their home,” she wrote.
There are more than 200,000 people diagnosed with ALS internationally, according to the ALS Society of Canada, and about 4,000 Canadians live with the disease. Roughly 1,000 Canadians are diagnosed annually.
ALS is not contagious. Most patients will die between two and five years after diagnosis.
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