By
http://www.nytimes.com/
Here’s how much of a bookworm Reese Witherspoon is:
In high school she won an award for reading the most books that were not on the required reading lists, a distinction that mortified her, because she had hidden how much she read from the other girls, lest anyone peg her as a nerd.
Ms. Witherspoon’s bibliophilia proved unstoppable, and now she estimates she goes through about four books a week. Plotlines, characters and good writing entrance her. Authors are her rock stars. A chance meeting with the writer Nick Hornby at a party seven years ago flipped her out. “I’m such a dork about authors,” she said.
All of which came in handy when Ms. Witherspoon embarked on a career revamp a few years ago. That was when the actress who immortalized Tracy Flick and Elle Woods, won an Oscar for playing June Carter Cash and cornered the Hollywood market for sunny self-possessed blondes with a lot going on upstairs, found herself facing scant roles.
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“Other than one studio, literally one, nobody was developing anything with a female lead,” Ms. Witherspoon, 38, said, sitting down to chat during the New York Film Festival a few weeks back. “It just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I was so mad. And then I thought: ‘Why am I so upset about this? Why don’t I do something about it?’ ” So, in 2012, with the Australian producer Bruna Papandrea, Ms. Witherspoon started a production company, Pacific Standard, that has burst from the starting gate with two of the most highly buzzed about films of the year. Each is based on a best seller that Ms. Reese optioned after tearing through the galleys more or less overnight.
The first, “Gone Girl,” from the novel by Gillian Flynn and starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, has earned more than $200 million worldwide since its October release. The second, “Wild,” based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, adapted by Mr. Hornby and set for release Dec. 5, has some prognosticators forecasting an Oscar nod for Ms. Witherspoon.
“I’m ecstatic,” she said, “that they both turned out as well as they did.”
Ms. Witherspoon was in New York to participate in a festival panel following a screening of “Wild,” and met up for the interview at the very plush, very beige restaurant Nougatine at Jean-Georges, at Columbus Circle. Wearing a crisp navy blazer and pumps, her golden hair pulled back, she looked more the savvy producer than red carpet regular. Still, her arrival sent a hush over nearby diners, something that Ms. Witherspoon took no apparent notice of, stardom being something she has navigated since she broke into movies as a teenager.
Playing Ms. Strayed has slingshot Ms. Witherspoon further from the rom-com ghetto that she began escaping around three years ago, after starring in three low-buzz love-triangle films. Making “a conscious effort to redirect,” she took a small role as the hard-bitten Juniper in the lauded 2013 Southern gothic indie “Mud.” Other against-type characters followed: a harried social worker aiding Sudanese refugees in “The Good Lie,” which opened last month, and a world-weary district attorney in Paul Thomas Anderson’s trippy ensemble piece “Inherent Vice” (Dec. 12).
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But it is her work in “Wild” that has entertainment writers bandying about the dreaded C-word: comeback. (Forbes got more creative, asking, “Can Reese Witherspoon Have Her Own ‘McConnaissance’?”)
“She was in a place in herself like: ‘I’m going to change your perception. I’m going to get out of my comfort zone,’ ” said Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed “Wild,” as well as last year’s award-winning “Dallas Buyers Club.”
In “Wild,” broken by the death of her adored mother, Ms. Witherspoon’s character embarks on a grueling 1,100-mile trek of the Pacific Crest Trail, with flashbacks to her rampant philandering, which torpedoed her marriage, and her heroin use. Along with filming scenes of rough sex and drug use, she said, during production she also toppled into frigid water under a 70-pound backpack and fended off mosquitoes and snakes. Still, Mr. Vallée said he was struck by how effortless she made acting seem.
“Reese has a way of — bang — nailing it,” Mr. Vallée said. “You wonder, ‘We were just talking about tacos and burgers.’ And you call, ‘Three, two, one, action,’ and a second later, her eyes are all teary. And five minutes later, you go, ‘Cut,’ and she’s talking about mustard on the burger.”
Apparent ease aside, Ms. Witherspoon has described the role as her most difficult, and part of her preparation involved getting hypnotized. “I went one time, and it was so helpful,” she said. “I get panic attacks, especially right before I start a movie.” She said the role also brought relief, after decades of being cast and typecast, willingly and not, as America’s sweetheart.
“I’ve sat through millions of development meetings where people are like: ‘We don’t want Reese to say profanity. We don’t want her to have sex. We don’t want her to take drugs,’ ” Ms. Witherspoon said. “I didn’t really feel the constraints of it until about three years ago, where I realized, ‘I’m not this.’ I’m a complex person that has so many different aspects in my personality. But somehow, I have this reductive experience where I’m put into this tiny little box.”
“Likable,” Ms. Witherspoon said with a hint of disdain. “Can we scrub the likable box? And what is likable? To me, likable is human, and real, and honest. To me, I find the character in ‘Wild’ much more likable than a lot of characters I’ve played in comedy. She’s telling the truth. She’s not ashamed of the sexual experiences she’s had. She’s not ashamed of her drug use.”
Thanks to viral videos, the world has recently gotten a few glimpses of Ms. Witherspoon’s off-camera very human self, too: via footage of her by dancing gaily last summer in Capri, Italy, and, more notoriously, tipsily telling off a police officer who arrested her for disorderly conduct last year, something she quickly apologized for in public.
“I think it was a moment,” she recently told reporters in London, “where people realized that I wasn’t exactly what they thought I was.”
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Ms. Witherspoon is also in a more contemplative place. She has a toddler, Tennessee James, 2, with her second husband, the agent Jim Toth, and is raising her two children with the actor Ryan Phillippe: Deacon, 11, and Ava, who is 15. “It’s interesting to see how men look at her now,” she said of Ava. “And what kind of women is she looking at in film? Who are her heroes?” Beyond some of Jennifer Lawrence’s characters, in the “The Hunger Games” and “Silver Linings Playbook,” Ms. Witherspoon said, “It’s pretty thin.”
This gave her more impetus to make films. She knew Ms. Papandrea, a producer on “Warm Bodies” and “Milk,” through mutual friends. Better roles for women was something they both sought. They have another 16 projects in development, and their comedy co-starring Ms. Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara opens next May.
“The perception after ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘Lucy’ was, ‘Everyone is going to run out and make female movies,’ and they haven’t yet,” Ms. Papandrea said. “We keep going back to ‘What will it take?’ ” Ms. Strayed, who has a cameo at the outset of “Wild,” said she considered several actresses before sending the manuscript to Ms. Witherspoon. “Some of the most brutally honest and emotionally raw things I’ve written are in ‘Wild,’ and some of the most comic things, too,” Ms. Strayed said. “Reese always seemed to me to be authentic. And really acting out of her passions, and also her humanity.”
After reading the galleys in 24 hours, Ms. Witherspoon called her agent, sobbing, declaring it “the most beautiful book,” not least because of Ms. Strayed’s bluntness and her unconventional path. (“I love to make people cry,” Ms. Strayed said with satisfaction. “I always have.” She guessed she had seen the film nearly 20 times, and said she had wept every time.)
Ms. Witherspoon added: “I said to my producing partner, ‘If we can pull this off, this’ll be the first movie, I believe, I can’t recall, but that stars a woman that at the very end has no money, no man, no parents, no job, no opportunities, and it’s a happy ending.’ How important, how needing of that, are we? How late to the party are we?”
Next, they optioned the children’s books “Pennyroyal’s Princess Boot Camp,” which is still in development, and then “Gone Girl,” a dark tale of marital implosion with a treacherous female character at its core. Ms. Witherspoon contemplated the lead part until David Fincher, who signed on to direct, told her he had a different vision. “I completely understood,” she said.
She had a moment of panic after both books ascended the best-seller lists, and called Ms. Papandrea to say: “We have to make these movies. And they have to be good, Bruna. Because people like these books.”
So far, so good. “Gone Girl” is a smash and “Wild” a film festival success, though Ms. Papandrea is mildly concerned that it will be labeled a chick flick. “It dawned on me that if this was ‘All Is Lost,’ no one would ever call it just a male movie,” she said.
But the hope with “Wild” is that a tale of a woman who surmounts financial woes, drug problems and grief by herself will resonate with men and women alike.
“We save ourselves,” Ms. Witherspoon said. “Every woman knows it. Every man knows it. You look up. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s a universal story. But it’s revolutionary in the way that a woman is allowed to tell it.”
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