Sandra Bullock on Her Best 'Practical Magic 2' Perk: Lee Pace's Tattoos

When Sandra Bullock agreed to both star in and produce Practical Magic 2, she understood that wearing two hats would demand a different kind of investment from her. What she may not have anticipated — or perhaps shrewdly negotiated — was that one of those producing duties would involve spending an entire month choreographing ink across her co-star Lee Pace's body. The revelation, shared in a group interview with Fandango, offers a glimpse into how seriously Bullock took her expanded role behind the camera on the long-awaited Warner Bros. sequel.

A Producer's Most Unusual Assignment

According to TheWrap, Bullock worked alongside the film's head of makeup for roughly four weeks before principal photography began, selecting each fake tattoo destined for Pace's character and determining precisely where it would land on his physique. "Everything that's on his body, I got to choose," she said, describing a process that involved moving designs around, sourcing the right crow motifs, and thinking carefully about negative space as an aesthetic principle. It is the kind of detail-oriented craft work that separates a producer who is genuinely embedded in a production from one who simply holds an honorary credit.

Pace plays Ian Wright, a scholar of magical history who becomes the love interest of Bullock's returning character Sally Owens. His body is covered in black-ink imagery — crows, a third eye, stars and other occult symbols — drawn directly from Alice Hoffman's 2021 source novel. That Bullock had authorial control over the visual language written onto her love interest's skin is, in a quiet way, a meaningful extension of her creative ownership over the project.

Nicole Kidman's Feigned Jealousy and Pace's Memorable First Day

The moment landed with particular comedic texture in the Fandango conversation, which also included co-stars Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Maisie Williams and Xolo Maridueña. Kidman — reprising her role as Bullock's on-screen sister Gillian — expressed theatrical surprise at having been kept in the dark about the arrangement. Pace, for his part, described his first day on set as "pretty magical" in the most literal sense: he was lying on a bed, eyes closed, covered in the freshly placed tattoos, when he heard the voices of Bullock and Kidman entering the room and beginning to discuss his appearance. "I am absolutely in Practical Magic 2," he recalled thinking in that moment. Bullock was characteristically direct in her assessment: "He's got a beautiful physique and he works hard on it."

For audiences curious about how the production is taking shape visually, Sandra Bullock returns in the first Practical Magic 2 trailer, which has already given fans a sense of the film's tone and aesthetic ambition.

Why Now, and What the Story Demands

Bullock was also candid about the longer question of timing — why a sequel to the beloved 1998 original is arriving more than two decades later. Her answer was less about studio scheduling and more about emotional readiness. Hoffman's follow-up novel, she argued, is "emotionally dense" in ways that required both she and Kidman to have accumulated enough lived experience to do the material justice. "Had we not lived the life that we had lived to bring to the story, it wouldn't have the same emotional core and depth," she said, framing the delay not as a gap but as a necessary maturation.

There is also a sense of urgency she articulated around saying things that felt unsayable in 1998 — a generational candor that the film appears to embrace. Sandra Bullock even found herself picking up Gen Z slang from younger castmates on set, suggesting a production that was as much a cultural exchange as a creative one. And for those following the film's full backstory, Evan Rachel Wood has spoken openly about being recast in Practical Magic 2, adding another dimension to the film's complex journey to the screen.

Practical Magic 2 opens in theaters on September 11.