The most embarrassing failure of Reese Witherspoon’s career: “I had to quit the movie”
You’d think that if an actor has won an Oscar and earned significant acclaim for their range, that they wouldn’t find themselves backing out of a movie – one made for children, no less – because of a skill issue. But that’s exactly what happened to Reese Witherspoon.
The actor, whose career began in the 1990s when she was a teenager, really came into her own as the decade neared a close, with roles in the likes of Cruel Intentions and Election, shooting her to stardom. Witherspoon has always possessed an apparent sense of ease when it comes to moving between comedic, lighthearted roles and much more dramatic ones.
Take her defining role in Legally Blonde, a performance that cemented the movie’s protagonist, Elle Woods, as one of the most iconic characters of the 21st century, and compare that with her Oscar-winning role as country singer June Carter Cash in James Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line – both are incredibly different, yet impeccable… It’s no surprise that she scooped up an Academy Award for the latter.
Years on, she has appeared in everything from the acclaimed Wild to the drama-filled HBO show Big Little Lies, as well as producing movies like Gone Girl and running her own book club, but she almost added Disney Princess to her repertoire in 2012, when she climbed on board to play Merida in Brave.
This would be Pixar’s first princess, but Witherspoon sadly had to back out. She’d lent her voice to various movies before, like Monsters vs. Aliens and Sing, but for Brave, she was required to do a Scottish accent. Now, the Louisiana-born Witherspoon has delivered a range of accents before – it’s not like she is totally incapable of changing her voice – but she found Scottish much trickier than she initially thought. It wasn’t meant to be.
Appearing on Lorraine, the actor opened up about her failure to master the accent, “Scottish is really… I was supposed to… I don’t want to talk about it. I tried to do a Scottish accent once. It was bad. I had to quit the movie. It’s not my finest moment. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She might not have mentioned that the movie was Brave in this interview, but director Mark Andrews (he replaced director Brenda Chapman mid-way through) released a statement that revealed Witherspoon’s involvement. “We did have Reese Witherspoon when we started the project, and she was on for quite some time,” he admitted.
Interestingly, Andrews claimed that her accent wasn’t the issue. “She was getting her Scottish accent down, she was working very hard, and it was sounding great, but as we were continuing with the movie, she had other movies lining up, so unfortunately, we were unable to continue with her and had to get a replacement.”
However, it seems like he wasn’t telling the whole truth, because Witherspoon ultimately came clean about her struggles with mastering Merida’s voice – instead, Kelly Macdonald, who was born in Glasgow, took on the role. Brave was a big success, and it’s a shame that Witherspoon had to miss out on voicing a princess, but sometimes these things just happen.
