Reese Witherspoon’s most embarrassing audition: “I got so scared”
Everyone gets a bit nervous now and then. Usually, it’s sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, arriving for a first date, or mentally preparing yourself for the bill for a single cheeseburger and chips at Five Guys. So, imagine the nerves as a hopeful teenage actor, you find out that your first audition is with Robert De Niro, because that’s what happened to Reese Witherspoon.
That role was in the frankly terrifying 1991 movie Cape Fear, and it was one Witherspoon didn’t land but didn’t stop her from becoming an Academy Award-winning actor of some repute. She recalled of the incident: “I got so scared when I walked into the room. I didn’t know who Robert De Niro was, so I was standing outside, and I was talking to the receptionist, and she was like, ‘You know, he’s the most important actor of our time’. I was 14. I’ve never seen GoodFellas, like I’ve never seen The Godfather, so it totally got on my nerves.”
While that audition didn’t go her way, she kicked her career off that same year in a passable coming-of-age drama called The Man in the Moon, and appeared in some reasonably forgettable projects over the next few years until, at the end of the ’90s, she starred in a few movies that became truly iconic.
Starting with 1999’s steamy Cruel Intentions, and then the brilliant black comedy Election with Matthew Broderick, for which she earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’, her success, especially as a comic actor, resulted in more plum roles and led to her now genre-defining performance as Elle Woods in 2001’s Legally Blonde.
The film covering the tale of a ditzy sorority girl turned lawyer extraordinaire was not only a box office smash but a zeitgeist-capturing one, which inspired global copycats and tied in perfectly with the rise of early internet stars like Paris Hilton; plus, it resulted in about a million tiny handbag dogs seemingly popping up out of nowhere.
So good was Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, and so successful was the film, earning around ten times its budget back at the cinemas, that it spawned not only a sequel two years later but also a TV movie and a musical, the latter of which has run for a lengthy 19 years and counting.
Back then, the actor was in some danger of being typecast, especially after Legally Blonde’s sequel, despite her obvious talent as a comic actor. But that was blown out of the water with her astonishing work in the Johnny Cash biopic from 2005, Walk the Line.
Her role opposite Joaquin Phoenix as Cash’s long-suffering wife, June Carter, resulted in her taking home an Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ in addition to a Critics’ Choice award, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. It entirely changed the public’s perception of what she was capable of as an actor and couldn’t have been further removed from her earlier work. She then bagged a second Oscar nomination for the incredibly brave Wild in 2014 before turning to TV with the likes of Apple TV’s The Morning Show.
Now, as announced earlier this year, Legally Blonde is on the way back with a series called Elle, which will act as a prequel to the movies. Witherspoon anointed her successor, Law and Order star Lexi Minetree, to don the famed short skirt and pink heels on a live video call. The actor will act as a producer for the show, which will hit screens in the summer of 2026 via Prime Video.
It’s all a long way from that first audition back in 1991 opposite De Niro, which neither of them seemingly forgot. Said Witherspoon: “He had to finish the lines for me, and then I auditioned for him ten years later. I thought he was never going to remember that I had bricked that audition, and he was like, ‘I remember you’. I was like, ‘Me?’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the one who couldn’t say the word’.”
