The iconic horror movie Reese Witherspoon turned down: “I’ve got no time for stupidity”
No one is doubting Reese Witherspoon’s success, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t miss out on a few interesting opportunities.
She may have reinvented herself in recent years as an influencer and television star thanks to Big Little Lies and The Morning Show, but she has been an acclaimed actress since the 1990s, with one of the biggest reasons for avoiding any career declines has been due to her strong eye for choosing projects that have a likelihood of working.
Although there are many stars who regret making less-quality films early on in their careers, Witherspoon’s trajectory in Hollywood started off on a high note with her acclaimed performances in the coming-of-age classic Man in the Moon, the fantasy comedy Pleasantville, the dark satire Election, and the neo-noir thriller Twilight. By the time she created a generational icon out of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, she had complete autonomy over her career.
Retaining this level of consistency also meant that Witherspoon had to turn down a lot of opportunities that could have resulted in failure, and while her opinion of raunchy comedies like American Pie makes sense, regarding which she flatly declared she had “no time for stupidity”, she also turned down the chance to star in the future horror franchises Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Directed by Wes Craven, most famous for creating A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1996’s Scream took place in a world where the characters were aware of the archetypes of horror films, leading to a smarter, scarier mystery, which made it such a surprise hit that a sequel was quickly put into production and released a year later; the franchise continues to this day, with Scream 7 set to hit theaters later this month.
It was a radical reinvention of the horror genre and used self-awareness to satirise the way that Hollywood tends to sanitise these stories, which ironically, Witherspoon turned down because, to her, it sounded too close to the type of generic slashers that Craven was intending to caricature.
However, it’s unclear if Scream would have significantly impacted her career, as it can often be a challenge for ‘scream queens’ to break out into other fields, such as Neve Campbell, who was praised for her performance in the franchise, but being in the sequels took up a significant portion of her schedule moving forward. Had Witherspoon agreed instead, she would have had difficulty pencilling in films like Four Christmases and Walk the Line, the latter of which earned her the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’.
Witherspoon may have been wrong in her assumptions about Scream, but she was wiser to reject the role in I Know What You Did Last Summer, and although it shared the same screenwriter in Kevin Williamson, the latter was a much cheesier and more banal teen-centric horror film that did very little for its stars.
While Wes Craven’s project created a franchise that continues to go strong, I Know What You Did Last Summer only spawned disastrous sequels, with the latest, simply carrying the original title, was released last summer, where it became a complete box office bomb and seemingly destroyed the future of films forever.
