Sandra Bullock is reflecting on the hardest years with Brian Randall. 

Three years after the Oscar winner’s longtime partner died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), she shared why she opted to keep his health battle private and shared insight into how it felt for her. 

“He asked me not to share,” Bullock admitted during an Aug. 17 appearance on the SmartLess podcast. “I know why he asked me not to.”

Still, the Gravity actress—who was with Randall for eight years before he died at 57 in 2023—admitted that honoring his dying wish, “isolated me in the process.”

Indeed, Bullock—mom to Louis, 16, and Laila, 12—shared that while she was initially on board with keeping Randall’s diagnosis private, it became too much to bear to only have her sister Gesine Bullock-Prado to lean on. 

“My sister was the only one who knew for a while,” Bullock explained. “At first I go, ‘Oh, I can handle that. I can be quiet.”

The 62-year-old admitted that she is typically willing to keep her private struggles under wraps. As she put it, “I don't wanna harm others because of what I do. So I think not talking for a while was good.”

However, Randall’s ALS battle coupled with the struggle of raising two young kids amid the pandemic became, for Bullock, “a trifecta that was pretty dark.”

Eventually, Bullock did confide in friends like Jennifer Aniston and Amanda Anka Bateman—the wife of SmartLess cohost Jason Bateman—but she was already in the middle of a lonely uphill battle. 

“I think where he was in his journey, both physically and mentally, I started grieving Brian four years before he passed,” she explained. “There was something that had shifted.”

As Bullock put it, “It is a traumatic diagnosis.”

Still, a wave of grief of course hit Bullock after Randall passed, once her role as a caregiver finally came to a close. 

“My person left a lot earlier than the body left,” she continued. “I don't think I ever dealt with that until after he passed, because you're just on this treadmill.”

While Bullock noted she didn’t know exactly why Randall wanted to keep his illness a secret, she previously shared the artist was “scared” to publicly confirm their romance at all. 

“My life was already on the track and here's this beautiful human being who doesn't want anything to do with my life,” Bullock said during a 2021 appearance on Red Table Talk, “but [is] the right human being to be there.”

For a look at Bullock through the years, keep reading…