“It really hurt my feelings”: how Reese Witherspoon rebounded from her career’s rock bottom
Never judge a book by its cover, they say, and if your overriding impression of Reese Witherspoon is of her tottering around in heels in a pink dress carrying a little dog and saying something like ‘Oh. My. God’, then it’s wise to remember she is, in fact, a high-powered media mogul worth half a billion dollars who could probably buy the county you live in without raising a perfectly-shaped eyebrow.
Admittedly it has been a good two decades since Witherspoon excelled in that get up in the two Legally Blonde movies, but so successful were they in the early 2000s, bringing in $250million at the box office, spawning a long-running stage musical plus a direct to video sequel and a forthcoming TV series called Elle, that her expectation-defying, ultra-girly lawyer is probably the part she is best-known for even now.
But for about a decade after that second movie, things were anything but smooth sailing for Witherspoon, who did pick up an Oscar in 2006 for her performance opposite Joaquin Phoenix in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, but then hit a brick wall, rather than going on to further success. She made several flops in a row, trying to recapture the comedic success of her earlier films like Sweet Home Alabama, but nothing was sticking.
Some years ago, she reflected on that period to disgraced chat show host Charlie Rose, admitting, “I was just kind of floundering career-wise, ’cause I wasn’t making things I was passionate about. I was just kind of working, you know. And it was really clear that audiences weren’t responding to anything I was putting out there.”
Rose reminded her that she had been particularly affected by a piece on fading movie stars in the New Yorker about actors who were no longer ‘box office magic’, prompting Witherspoon to reply, “Yeah, I was one of ’em. I thought I was reading, like, a profile on another actor. Then somewhere down, at the end, it said, ‘The people who are washed-up’, and I think it included me, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson. And I remember just being like, ‘OK’. It really hurt my feelings. Really hurt my feelings.”
But rather than go under, it seemed to motivate Witherspoon to change direction, which she did to impressive effect, to put it mildly. She appeared in more dramatic roles as the 2010s began and then founded her own production company, which kicked off with the enormous David Fincher-directed thriller Gone Girl starring Ben Affleck. Then she took on a challenging star role in 2014’s Wild, which she also produced, and which went down so well with critics that she landed a second ‘Best Actress’ Oscar nomination the following year.
From that point on, she started to focus on business ventures while making the occasional appearance in movies and the Apple TV series The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston, and once she took full control of her production company in 2016, things took off in a big way.
She sold off her majority stake in 2021, at which time the company had a valuation of some $900m, and also runs a massively popular book club. She founded a retail brand as well and co-authored her first novel with Harlen Coben last year.
So it’s fair to say she’s doing alright. But things in life often seem to come full circle, and so naturally Legally Blonde 3 is in the works, with Witherspoon set to return as Elle Woods more than 20 years later.
