George Lopez revealed that his eponymous sitcom would never have come to be if it wasn’t for his good friend Sandra Bullock.
“I was at the comedy club. I was drinking. In the mid, late ‘90s, I was drinking a lot,” Lopez, 63, shared on the Thursday, September 5, episode of the “Politickin’ with Gavin Newsom, Marshawn Lynch and Doug Hendrickson” podcast. “I was in Austin, and Sandra Bullock lived in Austin, and Dave Chappelle had been there the week before. And the manager of the club comes to me and says, ‘I think Sandra Bullock’s gonna come in. She called, she’s gonna come in.’”
Lopez recalled asking the venue’s manager to ask Bullock, 60, not to attend one of his shows. “I got on my knees in that f—king green room and I said, ‘Please, please don’t let her [come].’ I didn’t even know if I was gonna know her in months or years or whatever,” he said. “I wished her not to come, and then, she didn’t come.”
About a year-and-a-half later, after Lopez said he had “cleaned up a little bit,” Bullock went to one of his shows while searching for comedic talent to work with. “She was like, ‘Come to my office,’ and we sat there for, like, three hours,” Lopez noted.
The two discussed the possibility of a TV show — which ended up being the sitcom titled George Lopez — the likes of which Lopez said had “never been done successfully on TV.” He continued: “At the end of [meeting] … I told her, ‘Hey, you know, what you’re gonna try to do has never been done successfully. And if I don’t ever see you again or whatever happens, I just want to say thank you, just thanks. Thanks for, you know, today.’”
Luckily, Bullock quickly erased his doubt in the series. “I had never had anybody believe in me, and she was like, ‘Why don’t you worry about being funny and why don’t you let me worry about everything else?’” he shared. “And man, I got in my car. Man, I was in tears.”
The duo went on to executive produce all 120 episodes of George Lopez, which ran for six seasons on ABC from 2002 to 2007. Bullock also appeared in a handful of episodes of the series as one of Lopez’s clumsy coworkers, Amy.
“She changed the direction of my life and everybody that’s in my family, and for no other purpose than she just thought I was funny,” Lopez gushed, adding that Bullock would also attend tapings of the show.
“I wouldn’t be anybody without her,” he stated.
Lopez booked a few TV and movie roles before the sitcom’s 2002 premiere. In the years since, he has starred in projects such as Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Valentine’s Day, Rio, The Smurfs, Saint George, Reno 911! and Blue Beetle. He currently stars alongside his daughter, Mayan Lopez, on NBC’s Lopez vs. Lopez.
Bullock, for her part, has taken on many memorable roles over the years, winning the 2010 Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side and scoring another Best Actress nomination in 2014 for Gravity. She announced she would be taking a break from acting the same month her most recent film, The Lost City, premiered in March 2022.
“I just want to be 24/7 with my babies and my family,” she explained to Entertainment Tonight at the time. “That’s where I’m gonna be for a while.” Bullock adopted her son Louis, 14, in 2010 when he was 3-and-a-half months old, and her daughter Laila, 11, at 2-and-a-half years old in 2015.
