‘Fear’: The uncomfortable scene Reese Witherspoon was forced to shoot
There have been many conversations in recent years about the use of intimacy coordinators on set, with many female actors speaking about the lack of care they had experienced when shooting physically vulnerable scenes.
Despite the public perception of the role, actors have not always been the highest of the pecking order on set, and in the past, many women were often treated as mere dolls and figures to act out the fantasies of the director. But in recent years, women in the industry have started to speak out about this treatment and advocated for safe shooting environments that protect the wellbeing of the cast and crew. But sadly, there are many stories in which this wasn’t the case, with Reese Witherspoon speaking about her experiences as a teenager when filming one infamous scene.
Witherspoon has created a dazzling creative empire through her production company Hello Sunshine, which was founded after the actor became sick of receiving offers to play one-dimensional female characters that were often written through the male gaze. After expressing concern to multiple studio heads, who told her that they only had a quota for one female-led story a year, the actor decided to put an end to the half-baked stories and start a company that was purely focused on women’s stories. The rest, as they say, is history, with Witherspoon helming projects such as Big Little Lies, Gone Girl and Wild, which have all been praised for their wonderfully complex female characters, changing film history as we know it.
However, Witherspoon’s time in Hollywood has been marked by equal ups and downs, with the actor starting out in the industry at eleven. Despite some of the changes made in recent years, Witherspoon began her career at a time in which the mistreatment of women was even more rampant than it is now, with the actor describing one particular scene from the 1996 film Fear.
Fear follows a young woman called Nicole who finds herself in a relationship with a dark man called David, realising that her picture-perfect boyfriend is not the person she thought he was. Mark Wahlberg stars alongside her, with the film becoming somewhat of a cult classic at the time of its release.
However, there is one scene that Witherspoon doesn’t remember fondly, despite being one of the most memorable moments from the film. There is a sex scene that takes place on a rollercoaster, with Nicole being digitally stimulated by David. However, Witherspoon later described the circumstances around the shoot, explaining how she requested a stunt double for the intimate scenes, which was rejected.
“I didn’t have control over it,” she explained. “It wasn’t explicit in the script that that’s what was going to happen, so that was something that I think the director thought of on his own and then asked me on set if I would do it, and I said no. It wasn’t a particularly great experience.”
She described this experience as being “formative”, saying: “It made me understand where my place was in the pecking order of filmmaking. I think it’s another one of those stories that made me want to be an agent for change and someone who maybe can be in a better leadership position to tell stories from a female perspective instead of from the male gaze.”
It is incredibly upsetting that so many female actors have been in similar positions and asked to perform scenes in which there is no consideration for their safety or comfort. It is because of stories like these that there has been an active effort for intimacy coordinators to become common place on set, with an additional person to advocate for their wellbeing and make sure that these stories are shot in a careful and considerate way.
