How Reese Witherspoon Turned Hollywood on Its Head

When she filmed her first movie at 14, Reese Witherspoon certainly didn’t think she’d stumbled upon her lifelong career. “I didn’t know how viable it was to really consider being an actor. I grew up in a practical family of doctors and nurses,” she recalls. But three decades later, Witherspoon has not only amassed a resume that includes several hit films and an Oscar, she’s created a second, even more influential, parallel career path as one of the industry’s most groundbreaking producers—an achievement that has led to her being named Adweek’s Media Visionary. After early film successes like Election and Cruel Intentions, Witherspoon had her first smash hit with Legally Blonde and later won the Best Actress Oscar for Walk the Line. But when the quality parts started drying up—as they often do for actresses in their 30s—she took matters into her own hands. The voracious reader self-funded a production company, Pacific Standard, and began optioning her favorite books from women authors featuring complicated, meaty female characters. After a promising producing start with the films Gone Girl and Wild, she really hit it big with the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies. Then, in 2016, Witherspoon doubled down, expanding to a full-fledged media company, Hello Sunshine, focused on female-centric stories. It not only makes film and TV (including all of Witherspoon’s high-profile projects over the past year: Big Little Lies: Season 2, The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston, which helped launch Apple TV+ last November, and the Hulu miniseries Little Fires Everywhere with Kerry Washington), but also podcasts, audio storytelling and digital series—and is the home of her monthly Reese’s Book Club. Witherspoon has already massively changed the industry but, in other ways, she’s just getting started. She reflected on the ups and downs of her career, learning to be a businesswoman on the fly and going from getting doors slammed in her face as a fledgling producer to kicking them down as an industry leader. As she explains, “If you want systems to change, you have to rethink how you want the system to work.” Here are highlights from her conversation with Adweek: Adweek: Election was an early breakout for you. But you’ve said for a long time after that came out, you were typecast as Tracy Flick. Did you see that coming, or was it a shock? Reese Witherspoon: It was surprising. I thought, isn't that what acting is? I guess people didn't really understand that I was something different. And at the time, there were very few parts for women. That's why I felt really lucky to get Legally Blonde. I was having a hard time reestablishing that I actually was an actor that had range. And how did being in your first commercial hit change things for you? It changed overnight. I had really smart managers and an agent at the time who said the best thing you can do is another film where you are the star, so this isn't a fluke—we need to get you back on set within a month. They did, and it was Sweet Home Alabama. The movie did really well, and it was a totally different character than Legally Blonde. So at that point, it felt very much like I was able to anchor movies myself. Fast-forward a few years, and you won the Oscar for Walk the Line. A lot of people think once that happens, your career is set. But that wasn’t the case for you. Yeah, I think there's a myth that there's a secret stash of perfect scripts waiting around for the Oscar winners, but every Oscar woman that I know didn't experience this windfall of great material. That's when I started to understand the pipeline problem: There's pipeline issues with people not developing things for women and not enough female filmmakers and not enough female screenwriters getting the opportunity to write from their own perspective. That's when I started to think, 10 years ago, what if I spent my own money developing books that I already know are successful with great female writers that know how to crack a story? That's when I focused on publishing and looking at books. You read three to four books a week. How do you make time for that on top of everything else? I read more books than I watch TV. I've always read for 30 minutes to an hour every day. It's just an extension of what I do to unwind. And I thought everybody read as much as I did. My husband [Jim Toth, then a top CAA agent] said, "No, you read a lot, honey! You should probably option some books." That's when it clicked for me. He held up a mirror to me and was like, "You should turn this into a producing company." At first, I just produced for myself, and then I kept saying, because I can’t do all the movies, I want to produce for other women. That was a huge goal for me. Long before Pacific Standard, you had an earlier production company with Type A Films. How was your approach different back then? Universal gave me a deal that I had from 24 to 29. And I just had no idea what movies I wanted to make. I don't think I had lived enough life, had enough experience in our business or understood the world in the way that I did more so when I was in my mid-30s. And I wasn't as confident as a filmmaker about making decisions or understanding the marketplace. "If you want systems to change, you have to rethink how you want the system to work." After your early producing successes with Gone Girl and Wild, you started focusing on TV instead of films. What prompted that shift? Seeing post-Oscar Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson starring in True Detective and seeing how cinematic that was. And then Top of the Lake, Jane Campion's limited series out of Australia with Holly Hunter and Elisabeth Moss. It was as good as any movie I would have ever watched, but I got four great movies instead of one. My husband and I talk about the business all the time. We started seeing the shift toward premium television shows. And I thought, this is a good way to get into premium television. I’ve got to find the right piece of material that could be broken up into six parts. And then Nicole Kidman and I, at the same time, read [Liane Moriarty’s novel] Big Little Lies. We called each other and were like, "Do you want to do it together? Let's do it together." What were your producing pitch meetings like pre-Big Little Lies and post-Big Little Lies? Night and day different. The Gone Girl process was really, really frustrating. One day, it'll be a chapter of a book [laughs]. Even being, at the time, an actress that was in a really enviable position in Hollywood, I could not get any traction as a producer. Multiple times, I got doors closed in my face or people tried to kick me off of [the project]. It was not until Big Little Lies came out, and we got all the Emmy Awards, when everything shifted. People started calling me, going, “What are you doing? You're self-funding this? Why?” I had learned if you want systems to change, you have to rethink how you want the system to work. It doesn't work doing the same old studio deal where they pay your overhead, and they put your projects in development for years and they don't ever get made. (Clockwise, from top left): Witherspoon had her first big hit with 2001's Legally Blonde, won an Oscar for 2005's Walk the Line, produced and starred in the 2014 film Wild, and produced/starred in three huge TV projects over a 12-month period: Hulu's Little Fires Everywhere, Apple TV+'s The Morning Show and Season 2 of HBO's Big Little Lies. I knew a different way was possible. I knew it was going to take a lot of capital. Right after Big Little Lies, though, I realized I didn't have enough capital to sustain that business. So I had to go raise money. And that's where Hello Sunshine came, and we pivoted into all media, not just film and television. Why did you want to do that? Looking at the way my teenagers were consuming media, they weren't watching television. They weren't going to the movie theaters anymore. I had a 17-year-old and a 13-year-old, and on Friday night, they were watching YouTube or they're on Instagram or Snapchat. Consumer behavior had changed, but Hollywood distribution models hadn't changed. It was clear as day that everything was shifting—and starting a new company, where we were able to be nimble enough to be on every platform, we got to experiment with YouTube and try out Instagram. My main thing that I wanted to accomplish was bringing the book club into the digital age, because the book club had been so analog, and that pipeline was so analog, but that's not how people were wanting to connect. So I thought, what if we could create a book club community that was on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram Live and invite you into that reading experience in a modern way? Within a 12-month period, you produced and starred in Big Little Lies: Season 2, The Morning Show and Little Fires Everywhere. Did you plan to do all those, one right after the other? I wasn't planning on being that busy, but everything just lined up perfectly. And then each platform that we were on, whether it was Apple or Hulu or HBO, wanted to use it as a real tentpole moment. Particularly with The Morning Show on Apple, because they were launching the service with that show. I hadn't worked back to back like that, ever. Also, I'm excited about the mission of our company. It's not just me. Every time we make a show, we employ 250 to 300 people. And with this mission about having great female partnerships with women like Kerry Washington and Jennifer Aniston, and female showrunners [Little Fires’] Liz Tigelaar and [Morning Show’s] Kerry Ehrin, and working with [directors] Mimi Leder and [the late] Lynn Shelton. It's an exciting moment where women are getting an opportunity to do things that are groundbreaking. You don't want to miss it. How has the pandemic changed the focus of Hello Sunshine? We’ve always had a mandate of positivity and optimism in our storytelling, and now we've doubled down on it, because I think there's going to be a lot of, to be honest, political fatigue after this year, which has been really hard on people. Being in the middle of the country, you see the toll it takes on people, and they want to escape through entertainment. This isn't to say everything needs to be light and frothy, but I do think we'll see a return to the family drama, the romantic comedy, the Christmas movie. And that's a lot of what we're developing—feel-good [projects]. "It’s an exciting moment where women are getting an opportunity to do things that are groundbreaking. You don’t want to miss it." At this point, would you act in any projects that you weren’t also producing? I would love it. I always say to my friends, “I'm an actor available for hire for any of your productions!” Acting is my first love. I love doing it, and I love working with new artists and established directors. You’ve had a few big brand partnerships over the years, from Avon to Crate & Barrel and now Elizabeth Arden. How do you decide to get on board with the brands you’ve worked with? I have a very close relationship with my audience; they trust me. And so I really have a high bar. If I collaborate with people, I have to really hit it off with the CMO and the CEO and know what they're trying to accomplish. When we're really aligned in our mission, whether that's reaching women or speaking to them where they are or talking about issues that are on their minds, that's what I'm interested in. That's a really authentic partnership. Because you can tell when people are matched with the wrong product. On a similar note, what was your approach to founding fashion label Draper James? I wanted to talk to the middle of America, and that was my first foray into entrepreneurship. So I definitely learned a lot. I had my failures; I had my successes. Raising money during that process made me feel more capable when it came to raising money for Hello Sunshine. I had to kind of do business school in three years with people who were patient enough to take time to teach me the vernacular, all the ins and outs of having a company. It definitely is not for the faint of heart. I feel like it taught me how to be a businesswoman: the good, the bad and all of it. Do you ever think about where your career would be right now if you hadn’t taken that producing leap a decade ago? When people ask me that, I think about this sign that was on a gym that I used to go to: "Don't look in the rearview mirror; you're not going that way." I don’t look backward that much, because this was always my path. I have always known I was supposed to do something, but it feels good to have figured it out in my mid-30s. It was a slow evolution, but I came to a reckoning with myself that I was here to change the landscape of the business I've been in since I was 14. And then the people that are coming up—I hope they all start companies like this. Because I don't want to be a lone entity. I want this to be an example that if you work really hard and you really care about whatever it is about storytelling that you care about that it's possible to start your own company. Click here to check out all of this year’s Hot List honorees.

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How Adweek Media Visionary Reese Witherspoon Turned Hollywood on Its Head

She became a producer to make the female-centric stories the industry had long ignored

Jason Lynch

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Jason Lynch