“I had done it to myself”: how an exhausting 2018 almost broke Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon has a career that most aspiring actors would kill for, but it nonetheless felt a bit disappointing when compared to the massive expectations that were laid out for her.
Witherspoon has been hailed since childhood, when her breakthrough performance in Man in the Moon earned rave reviews, leading her to become one of the most memorable characters of the 1990s when she took on the role of Tracy Flick in Election, and it was only a few years later that she nailed the role of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, despite not being even close to the first choice for the role.
Winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ for her role as June Carter in Walk the Line should have opened up even more opportunities for Witherspoon, but instead, it felt like she was burdened by hype, and in the decade following her Oscar victory, she primarily made romantic comedies, which steadily began to decline in quality.
Despite receiving a second Oscar nomination for the 2014 film Wild, Witherspoon had yet to reclaim her status as one of the industry’s most beloved stars, but she decided to commit to a radical work effort in 2018 that required her to make some of the most challenging moves of her career, all at once.
“In 2018, I was making three television shows at once, and I don’t know if people understand this, but each television show takes six months to make,” she said, “So they were stacked on top of each other”.
At a time when streaming services were all trying to assemble as many prestige shows as they could, Witherspoon was in major shows from HBO, Apple TV, and Hulu, and she admitted that keeping these characters and parts straight was an immense challenge.
“In the morning, I’d go be dressed as Bradley Jackson, change my clothes, run to another soundstage, be Madeline Martha Mackenzie in Big Little Lies and then go do a night shoot with Kerry Washington on Little Fires Everywhere,” Witherspoon recalled. “I wanted to lay down sideways and melt into the earth. I just cried and cried and cried, and I had done it to myself, but it all worked out. And you can do really, really, really hard things.”
The Morning Show, Big Little Lies, and Little Fires Everywhere were all Emmy-nominated shows that represented the type of prestige television that streaming services lobbied for, especially if they could get major stars like Witherspoon attached.
With the launch of Apple TV in 2019, The Morning Show was among the first streamable titles, which allowed them to stand out amidst the competition, whereas HBO’s Big Little Lies was to be a limited series that the network decided to renew for a second season to capitalise on the rave response to the first, and Little Fires Everywhere was based on a bestselling novel, which, a decade prior, might have been made into a film, but it made sense in 2018 to do a more thorough adaptation for the small screen.
Not all of these projects fared well with critics, as the second season of Big Little Lies in particular caught strays for how unnecessary it felt as an expansion. Nonetheless, it was hard to fault Witherspoon’s performance in any of these shows, as she had successfully transformed herself into three distinct characters.
