Reese Witherspoon making her own calls
Actress working to create opportunities for female-driven projects in industry
Sitting next to Nicole Kidman in makeup on the set of “Big Little Lies,” Reese Witherspoon had questions. Loads of questions. What was it like to work with Stanley Kubrick? How did you do the musical numbers in “Moulin Rouge!”?
Witherspoon loves movies. At age 44, she has been working on sets for three decades and enjoys nothing more than digging into film lore.
Kidman, though, had more existential musings she wanted to explore. “Do you ever think about dying, Reese?” Kidman would ask her co-star. “Because I think about it all the time.”
“And she’s like, ‘Nope, I don’t think about it because I know where I’m going,’ ” Kidman relates over the phone from her Nashville, Tennessee, home. “I wish I had her certainty. Reese doesn’t fear things, that’s for certain.”
Hearing Kidman’s story, Witherspoon laughs, chalking her faith up to her Episcopal upbringing in Nashville. She went to church every Wednesday and Sunday, singing her heart out in the church choir for nine years and loving every minute of it.
“I don’t have a lot of fear, that’s true,” Witherspoon says. “There’s a time and a purpose and a place, and I don’t fear death because I know there’s heaven. I know it.”
We’re talking on the phone in early May, Witherspoon from her home in Pacific Palisades, where she has been sheltering in place with her husband, Quibi executive Jim Toth; her college-student daughter, Ava; and younger sons, Deacon and Tennessee.
Unlike the entitled woman she played on the Hulu limited series “Little Fires Everywhere,” Witherspoon possesses a self-awareness about her privilege and position, knowledge forged through 30 years of working in Hollywood, seeing and experiencing inequities that made her push for equal-pay-for-equalwork agreements and to start her own media company, Hello Sunshine, to, among other things, tell stories about women — all kinds of women.
In short: She has found her purpose.
“I’ll never forget, I had a financial adviser tell me, ‘You need to start saving,’ I was like 37, and he said, ‘You need to start saving right now because you’re going to be making drastically less money in your 40s. Basically, you’re not going to have much of a career,’ ” Witherspoon remembers.
I ask what happened to that financial adviser.
“Oh, I fired him,” Witherspoon answers quickly, laughing. “I don’t need that kind of ...” She pauses, looking for the right words. Witherspoon likes to be precise, and as she has grown older and come to understand herself better, she’s honed a candor that’s refreshing in its aversion to nonsense.
“I believe in abundance,” Witherspoon continues, landing on the phrasing. “I believe creativity is endless. I mean, I can get on the phone with Diane Ladd, and she can talk for two hours about creativity, and everything she says is spot-on. There’s something inside artists and actors and filmmakers that’s insatiable. And if you are one of the lucky ones, as I am now, you get to put things up on their feet and see them be made. I feel really lucky every day.”
Three of those projects she produced — season two of HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show” and Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere” — ran this past year, a bounty that would have knocked Witherspoon’s financial adviser sideways. Then again, Witherspoon never would have envisioned this bounty a few years ago, either. But after meeting with every studio head in Hollywood, asking what projects they were developing for women and finding the answers unsatisfactory (“We’re doing one movie for a woman, and we can’t have two” was one response), Witherspoon took matters into her own hands, founding Hello Sunshine in 2016 to develop female-driven projects.
“I wasn’t getting calls ... and I’m still not,” she says. “The phone’s not ringing. If Nicole and myself aren’t doing this work or Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie and Laura Dern ... we’re working hard to create a surplus. We have to give each other ideas and produce for each other because no one’s out there thinking of us first.”
Witherspoon says she felt that acutely after she won her Oscar for playing June Carter Cash in the 2005 film “Walk the Line,” an achievement that, instead of opening up opportunities, left her feeling “frozen” for several years.
Agents had told her for years to never play a mother because it would age her and ruin her career. Witherspoon couldn’t wrap her head around what she was hearing. She gave birth to her daughter, Ava, when she was 23. She was a mother, and being a mother transformed her life. Why couldn’t motherhood be thoughtfully explored in movies and television?
“There was a lot of talk about who we were supposed to be for other people,” Witherspoon says, “and, trust me, I listened to it for a long time. It was like we’re supposed to only create fantasy people.”
“Little Fires Everywhere” uses motherhood to explore issues of race and class. Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, a perfectionist mom, not far removed (at least initially) from her tightly wound Madeline on “Big Little Lies.” The story centers on the contentious relationship between Elena and single mother Mia Warren, played by Washington, who executive produced the series along with Witherspoon, Liz Tigelaar, Lauren Neustadter, Pilar Savone and Lynn Shelton, who died last month of a blood disorder.
Witherspoon says people often ask her why she feels such a sense of urgency in telling so many women’s stories across an array of platforms — in addition to the movies and TV series, Hello Sunshine produces podcasts and digital series and serves as a home to a book club. Well, she might feel certain about what happens after she dies, but these days, that’s just about it when it comes to any positive assurance about the future. So when, if, things return to normal, she hopes to resume that mission.
“Think about the hundreds of years, if not thousands of years of lost women’s stories,” she says. “How ... can I not feel that there’s a sense of urgency? Every woman I know that is working to tell stories of women or marginalized groups feels the same way. You don’t know how long a window will last. You hope it lasts a long, long time, but you never know.”