Witherspoon to women: ‘This is our time’
LOS ANGELES — Reese Witherspoon remembered when she met with several film production studios in 2011 to ask them how many movies were being developed for women.
The studios’ responses nearly floored her.
“Of all the major seven studios, the answer was one,” Witherspoon said after she received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award at The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment gala in Los Angeles. The Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress was handed the award by her friend actress Kerry Washington for excelling in film and her philanthropic efforts.
Witherspoon said she was grateful to receive the award named after Lansing, the former Paramount Pictures CEO who was the first woman to head a Hollywood studio. While she called Lansing a “trailblazer,” the actress recalled her meeting with studios that felt “grim.”
“One movie was being made with a female lead out of 140 movies,” she continued. “As I was told by a studio head at the time, ‘Well, we already have one female star this year. We can’t make two.’ Can you guess which year this was? 2011. Not 1911. 2011.”
Witherspoon said the moment helped empower her to start her own production company, Hello Sunshine, which has produced Oscar-nominated films “Gone Girl,” “Wild” and the HBO drama series “Big Little Lies” with an all-female leading cast.
The actress told the packed room of about 600 people, mostly women, that “this is our time.”
“A lot of people can recognize a problem, look at it and complain about it,” she said. “But not everybody is going to do something about it. Leaders are really doers. Even though you don’t think of yourself as a leader, or you’re hesitant or you’re hypnotized by words saying ‘You can’t.’ Too bad. Do it anyway.”