This holiday season, Sandra Bullock is teaching her children it’s better to give than to receive.
While appearing on NBC’s Today Tuesday, the actress, 54, said her daughter Laila Bullock, 6, and son Louis Bullock, 8, won’t be opening dozens of presents this Christmas, as they’ve done in the past. Typically, the holiday is “really, really overdone,” she said, “because I overdo it, and then I panic that I didn’t do enough. Then I get more—and then everyone else has overdone it.”
“But this year we just stopped. We just stopped. Because there’s so much happening in the world where people don’t have anything. And we said, ‘Why don’t we just make this about other people?'” Sandra continued. “And they were amazing about it. So, Christmas is three small gifts.”
Sandra also talked to Hoda Kotb about bringing her two children to the set of her upcoming thriller Bird Box (premiering Dec. 21 on Netflix). “Lou was very interested in what everyone’s worst fear was. Like, he would go around to the actors saying, ‘Well, what is your worst fear?’ Like, he knew what mine was. Mine was anything happening to them. You know, and I said, ‘I’m not going to tell you how dark I go.’ But I said, ‘Anything that happens to you.’ I think the worst thoughts all day. They know I worry all the time,” the single mom revealed. “All the time. 24/7.”
In the post-apocalyptic film, Sandra’s character blindfolds herself and her two children as she guides them through the woods to avoid an invisible, supernatural entity that leads its victims to commit suicide. “If you look, it will cause you to experience your greatest fear,” she said, pointing out that it’s “a metaphor for motherhood” and “what’s going on socially in the world.”
The actress doesn’t like “scary” movies, but she was drawn to the script from the get-go. “Oddly, this came about when my kids said, ‘Why don’t you make something for us?'” the Oscar winner said, laughing. “I now realize they were talking about animated or Marvel. But, when I read it…”
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