“I can remember being in pictures in which I was the only woman on the set and there would be 150 men,” Reese Witherspoon recalled in a new Vanity Fair profile. “Maybe there would be a couple of women in wardrobe. I remember when I was a kid I would find them and cling to them.”
Those memories, among other factors — such as her love of reading, and her desire to support other women — have influenced the Oscar winner’s acting career, as well as her ventures in producing. “I always knew from the time I was seven that I wanted to be a storyteller or an actor or a singer,” she said. “Or a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. I think that’s why I’m in awe of writers because I’ve tried to sit down and do it. I have ideas for stories all the time. I could never figure out how things ended.” As a producer, however, she’s knows exactly what she’s doing. On projects such as “Gone Girl,” “Wild,” and “Big Little Lies” — all adaptations of books by female writers — she is offering women opportunities on-screen and off.
Her latest is “Little Fires Everywhere,” a Hulu miniseries based on Celeste Ng’s bestseller. Witherspoon is exec producing as well as starring as Elena, a tightly wound woman whose world is upended when she crosses path with Mia (fellow EP Kerry Washington). Yet Witherspoon’s work isn’t limited solely to representation. Per the source, she is committed to receiving equal pay for equal work — a fight she won at HBO, the cabler that aired “Big Little Lies.” Even better, her advocacy made things easier for other women down the road.
“An actress came up to me at a party and said, ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’” Witherspoon revealed. “I had no idea what she was talking about. The day after the HBO equal pay thing went through, they called her agent to rewrite her contract. She was then paid twice as much as she had been.”
Witherspoon has been appearing on-screen since she was a teenager, so she’s all too aware of Hollywood’s systemic misogyny, and its pattern of pigeonholing women, especially as they age. “When I came up in the business, there were all these men’s magazines we were told to cater to. I was never in Maxim. I was never picked as a GQ girl, and I’m okay with that because that’s not how I wanted to be viewed. That’s not how I see myself,” she explained. “I always say, ‘Funny doesn’t sag.’ I always just wanted to be funny, you know? And you can’t be rendered obsolete if you just keep being funny,” she observed. “Guess what gets rendered obsolete? Your boobs go south, your face goes south, your ass goes south, but you can always be funny. And those are my idols, my heroes — Goldie [Hawn], Holly Hunter, Diane Keaton, Nancy Meyers — smart and funny.”
In the piece, Witherspoon underlines that, although she always avoided sexually exploiting herself, that didn’t necessarily protect her from predators. “I was assaulted, harassed. It wasn’t isolated. I recently had a journalist ask me about it. She said, ‘Well, why didn’t you speak up sooner?’ And I thought, that’s so interesting to talk to someone who experienced those things and then judge them for the way they decide to speak about them. You tell your story in your own time when you’re ready. But the shame that she tried to put on me was unreal, and then she wrote about how selfish I was for not bringing it up sooner.”
Obviously, the world Witherspoon was coming up in as an emerging actress is very different from the #MeToo era we’re living in now. “There wasn’t a public reckoning 25 years ago when this stuff happened to me. There wasn’t a forum to speak about it either,” she stressed. “Social media has created a new way for people to express themselves that I didn’t have. That’s the great strength in power and numbers. I think we have a lot of judgment and that’s unfortunate because we’re all tenderfooted in these new times. We’re trying to find our identity. That’s what I really like about ‘The Morning Show,’” she added, referring to her Apple TV+ series, which is set at a news program that is rocked by sexual harassment allegations.
Witherspoon stars in and exec produces “The Morning Show.” “Lucy in the Sky” and “Truth Be Told” are also among her recent producing credits. She won an Oscar for her leading role in “Walk the Line” and an Emmy for exec producing the first season of “Big Little Lies.” Her other acting credits include “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Home Again.”
The first three episodes of “Little Fires Everywhere” hit Hulu tomorrow, March 18. New episodes will then be released weekly.
Head over to Vanity Fair to read the Witherspoon profile in full.
