Flashback: Sandra Bullock Dreads Swimsuit Scene

Before Sandra Bullock teams up with the uproarious Melissa McCarthy as an FBI agent in The Heat, let's take a trip back to 2000 to another film in which she worked for the FBI: Miss Congeniality.

In the film, which has since become one of Bullock's best known, she plays an undercover agent posing as a beauty pageant participant. The humor stems from her character's ("Gracie Hart") difficulty refining herself from a tomboy into an elegant model.

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In her real life, Bullock maintains she's a hybrid of a tomboy and a beauty queen.

"I might dress like a slob but I realize I'm very much [a] girl," the then-36-year-old actress says. "I'll do my own moving of things as much as I can physically but you can't get away from [being a girl]."

In order to complete the transformation of her character, Bullock reveals that there were certain wardrobe tricks that were implemented on her that helped accentuate her figure. Among them were padding in her dress and the strategic use of tape.

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"I've learned a lot about the tricks," the Virginia native says. "You look at people and you go, 'How is it that they manage to look like this?' or '[Their] waist looks so tiny'—you can build a body. You can really build a body."

Although there is an array of wardrobe tricks, the variety is limited when clothes because sparse, as they do in Miss Congeniality's swimsuit scene, which Bullock unenthusiastically performed.

"Reluctantly, yes," Bullock says of shooting the film's swimsuit scene. "That was a huge bone of contention for me. I was trying to get it written out so many times. It's in the script. We already shot it—outside in San Antonio."

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Watch the full flashback above for more from Bullock in 2000, and check her out as another undercover FBI agent 13 years later in The Heat, in theaters June 28.