Sandra Bullock reveals the shocking question she kept getting asked about “Practical Magic”
Sandra Bullock reveals the shocking question she kept getting asked about “Practical Magic”
Kathleen PerriconeFri, September 4, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC
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‘Practical Magic 2’ star Sandra Bullock reflects on original 1998 filmCredit: Entertainment Weekly/YoutubeKey Points -
Sandra Bullock reveals the shocking question she kept getting asked about Practical Magic while promoting the film in 1998.
“If I heard one more time, you know, ‘How many women do you need in a film?’” Bullock tells Entertainment Weekly.
Critics also badgered the actress about the film’s tone, a hodgepodge of “comedy and drama and magic.”
When Practical Magic arrived in theaters back in 1998, critics weren’t exactly spellbound.
The story of two sisters (Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock) who descend from a long line of witches (and the cursed men who love them) was largely perceived as some sort of feminist statement. As further proof, many reporters pointed to the film’s supporting characters: aunts (Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing), daughters (Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip), mothers, female friends, and townswomen.
The promotion of Practical Magic was “a bumpy road,” Bullock tells Entertainment Weekly, ahead of the sequel’s release. At the press junkets three decades ago, one ridiculous question came up over and over again.
‘Practical Magic’ stars Dianne Wiest, Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, and Stockard ChanningCredit: Warner Bros
“If I heard one more time, you know, ‘How many women do you need in a film?’” she recalled, as the sequel’s younger generation of actresses, Joey King and Maisie Williams, reacted in shock.
The other complaint Bullock regularly heard: “‘There’s just so many tones, like comedy and drama and magic.’ And I’m like, have you lived any life?”
All the negativity was “surprising,” she admits. “I don’t want to say I had shame, but I was sad at how it sort of was received initially… We knew what we were making and why we were making it. The response wasn’t what it is now. Different time.”
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Indeed, back in 1998, after Bullock expressed her enthusiasm for the film’s pro-female message in an interview with the Orange County Register, the male journalist mocked her for “stepping momentarily on a soapbox.”
The actress had simply explained why she was drawn to Practical Magic. “It’s a storyline of love between two women where the two women are not stealing each other’s husbands or stabbing each other in the back,” she said. “It’s about support, and that is important to me.”
Denise Di Novi, who produced the original and the new sequel, previously recalled the misogyny that surrounded the film in a 2024 interview with Rolling Stone.
“Believe it or not, we actually got criticism for having too many women in the movie,” she said. “There was one review I always quote: “How many women can you fit in one movie? In Practical Magic, too many.”
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Di Novi, who also produced Heathers, Catwoman, and Little Women (both the 1994 and 2019 versions), acknowledged that Practical Magic was “an unusual movie in that we had three generations of women and the guys were the supporting-actor love interests, which is the flip side of what every movie at that time had been. We didn’t get great reviews at the time, because 98 percent of critics were men.”
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
