Reese Witherspoon (Mostly) Avoids Darker Fare Because ‘People Like To See Me Do Light Movies’
Reese Witherspoon has done her share of darker fare. One of her Oscar nominations is for 2014’s Wild, in which she plays a damaged woman trying to overcome a grief-induced self-destructive patch. But at the movies, at least, she mostly does rom-coms and nice escapist fare, like Netflix’s Your Place or Mine from earlier this year. There’s a reason for that: She thinks that’s what her fans want.
“I’m not meant to be doing dark, heavy, intense, horror, gore, darkness movies,” the actress said at an event for her media company Hello Sunshine this weekend, as per The Hollywood Reporter. She elaborated:
“People like to see me do light movies, and I was like, OK. It doesn’t put you in the cool kids club a lot but I don’t care, I don’t want to be in the cool kids club. I want to make optimistic stuff that makes girls excited to be women in this world, because it is a wonderful thing to be a woman in this world.”
At the event, Witherspoon also talked about launching her company in 2016, which she did after noticing how few female-centric movies and shows were being made at the time.
“After I did a whole lot of soul searching and a lot of complaining to anyone who would listen, namely my mother, I realized what so many people in this room have realized, is that if you want to fix a problem, you have to be part of the solution. I would like to also point out women are always part of the solution,” Witherspoon said. “We’ve had enough of people telling our stories for us. One of the biggest rules in my family is you get to tell your own news, and a version of that in Hello Sunshine terms is women get to tell their own stories.”
Of course, Witherspoon is on a dark-ish TV series, namely The Morning Show, which can get pretty intense, with or without Jon Hamm.
(Via THR)