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Simmering tension between two women lights up Reese Witherspoon’s new TV drama – and it’s set to be the next Big Little Lies...
There’s a house on fire. A big beautiful house made of old brick and adorned with latticed windows. It’s burning in the winter night, shooting up in flames that will destroy everything inside. The curtains, the furniture, all the accumulated paraphernalia of a family’s life, from the photographs to the vases, a bicycle to a violin, all of it will be lost.
The owner of the house, a rich woman, watches from the street, her features frozen in shock. The next morning she stands with her husband and a police officer in front of the wreckage. ‘We’ve found evidence of an accelerant,’ the officer tells them. ‘There were little fires everywhere. The fire didn’t just happen – it was set.’
Although the woman’s face remains still, her lower lip twitches a little as she begins to realise that not only has her home been destroyed, but it was done on purpose. And so begins Little Fires Everywhere, the new TV miniseries based on Celeste Ng’s bestselling book, a stark tale about motherhood, daughterhood, social divisions, secrets, lies and chickens coming home to roost in sometimes unexpected places.
It is 1997, and in the exclusive and overwhelmingly white Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, queen bee of the social scene Elena Richardson, wife of a successful lawyer and mother of four teenagers, has given up progressing her career as a journalist to throw herself into motherhood.
Happily married and well-connected, she’s at the top of her game. Until, that is, she meets Mia Warren, a talented artist and devoted single mother to Pearl (played by Lexi Underwood), her teenage daughter. Mia, who’s constantly broke and openly unimpressed with Elena’s elevated social standing, has just blown into town from who knows where, and is now renting half of a house that Elena’s family owns. But when Elena’s son Moody (Gavin Lewis) develops a crush on Pearl and she spends more and more time at the Richardsons’ house, the consequences will affect Elena’s life in ways neither she nor Mia could have imagined.
The author, Celeste, is an award-winning ChineseAmerican writer, whose highly praised first novel Everything I
Never Told You – the tale of a family whose child is found drowned – was published in 2014. When Little Fires Everywhere, set in the affluent Cleveland community in which Celeste grew up, was published in 2017 it was hailed a masterpiece and won Amazon’s Best Fiction Book Of The Year.
It also caught the eye of Reese Witherspoon, who chose it as the September 2017 pick for Reese’s
Book Club, an online project she launched in partnership with her production company, Hello Sunshine, and which had quickly become a heavyweight influencer with the power to shoot titles to the top of the bestseller list.
Reese first turned her hand to production in 2012. ‘I realised I was seeing a complete lack of interesting characters for women on screen and it really bothered me,’ she once told me. ‘I was watching really fantastic actresses all clamouring for one role, which was just a horrible part as The Wife or The Girlfriend, and I thought, “These women have so much more to offer, so many bigger stories to tell. We need to start talking about the female experience with much more complexity – we are 50 per cent of the population, we should be telling 50 per cent of the stories too!”’
Her company had produced two Oscar-nominated films, Gone Girl and Wild, before Reese turned her attention to television with her first big production, Big Little Lies, which exploded onto the small screen in 2017. Somewhat to the surprise of both Reese and her co-star, co-producer and good friend Nicole Kidman, it quickly became a global phenomenon. Since then, Reese has found further success with another friend, Jennifer Aniston, in The Morning Show, the delicious tale of backstage backstabbings at a TV news network.
Now, with the mini-series of
‘Mia’s afraid all her secrets will start to come out’ KERRY WASHINGTON
Little Fires Everywhere – already hailed as ‘moreish, searing and excellent’ – it’s becoming clear that Reese’s golden touch for a hit TV show has only strengthened over the last few years.
‘I couldn’t have imagined being part of this gigantic production seven years ago,’ she says when we talk in Los Angeles pre-lockdown. ‘I was going through a real fallow period as an artist, when I’d go to studios looking for a job and they would say, “Well, we’re making one movie with a woman in it this year, and we’ve already made it.” I’m not kidding!
‘That’s why I started my own company – which I funded myself – because I said, “OK, this institution wasn’t made to include me. So I have to build something outside of it to tell the stories I want to tell – they do not exist under the umbrella of one particular studio. There’s just not the breadth of storytelling there.”’
At the heart of Little Fires Everyrent where is the personality clash between two women, driven perfectionist
Elena (played by Reese) and tough survivor Mia, who recognise in the other a spirit sometimes uncomfortably close to their own. For the part of Mia, Reese says that as soon as executive producer Lauren Neustadter suggested their mutual friend Kerry Washington, the star of
Scandal, she realised they’d found the perfect fit. ‘I said, “Oh, yes!”. Kerry and I had been looking for something to do together, so when this came along it felt perfect. I could immediately imagine her doing it, so I was thinking, “Say yes, please say yes.”’
As it turned out it was not a difficult conversation, as Kerry, who was also an executive producer on the show, says, ‘It was a nobrainer. The existence of this show, and others like it, speaks to the power of female friendship. It’s been very exciting because the whole process has been filled with that female partnership thing.’ Nevertheless, both women admit that on the first day they shared a scene, they were both distinctly nervous. ‘It’s the scene where we first meet,’ says Kerry, ‘where Mia comes to look at the apartment that Elena wants to
out. It was a perfect first scene – here were the characters checking each other out, and here were Reese and I checking each other out. I’d never worked with her before so we were discovering each other’s process. Does Reese like to shoot a scene twice, or only once? Does she stay in character between scenes? Does she want me to? Things like that.’
‘We do work differently,’ Reese acknowledges. ‘I don’t fully understand Kerry’s process, but I really benefit from her ideas. She had an ad-lib in one scene where she screams this not-nice thing at me and it was almost like my hair blew back! I couldn’t say my lines because I was so flustered! But that was very interesting to play with. It’s fun to work with an actress of this calibre.’
Once they had found their rhythm, they devoted their energies into attacking their roles. On the surface Mia, the unconventional artist, is the free spirit. But as the story unfolds we learn she’s harbouring uncomfortable truths about herself. ‘She has walked through life with a lot of boundaries in order to survive,’ says Kerry. ‘Mia has had to maintain a lot of walls because she has a lot of secrets. She’s trying to have the way she’s living be the right choice and the only choice – she’s afraid that if her secrets come out, the very definition of her family may not hold.’
Elena, on the other hand, has no such insecurities. ‘She has a sort of artifice about herself,’ says Reese. ‘Elena has this idea of life that is perfectly constructed. She lives in the same sort of house her mother lived in, and she cuts her hair the same way her mother did. She goes to the country club at the same time her mother did. Everything follows a set pattern, and as the series progresses and things get a little messier, she becomes very upset.
‘I was nervous about this part because I have to say some really bad things – not just to Mia, but to children – and to put that kind of stuff out into the world is difficult. But the ideas behind it are important. Kerry and I figured out early on that, since
‘I was told not to play a mother, that it’ll age me’ REESE WITHERSPOON
the story happens in 1997, we were basically playing our mothers!’
Central to the story is the idea of what motherhood means. The actresses, each a mother of three (Reese has Ava, 20, Deacon, 16, and Tennessee, seven, while Kerry has Isabelle, six, Caleb, three, and a stepdaughter whose name she keeps private), agree the chance to explore motherhood on the screen is long overdue.
‘I was told not to play a mother on screen,’ says Reese. ‘Everyone was saying to me, “Don’t do it. It’ll age you.” But I was 36 and I had three kids, so my real life wasn’t being reflected in any person I was playing and that felt odd.’
‘I was told it was the kiss of death,’ Kerry agrees. ‘That once you play a mother, you’re no longer the ingenue. But I can’t imagine the loss of depth in my work if I’d refused. We’re at a time in this business where we can be successful actresses, on the covers of magazines, and still tell stories about motherhood. People want to be told stories about motherhood.’