Reese is the Word

She may be America’s sweetheart but Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon isn’t resting on her laurels. The actres-producer is on a mission to reshape Hollywood and create more solid roles for women.

- Ben Travers and Jane Taylor

Even though she’s long been one of Hollywood’s most loved women, Reese Witherspoon has struggled to overcome her image as an effervescent southern belle. Best known as a rom-com queen, the actress, who won an Oscar for Walk the Line in 2006, has always craved more serious roles, and feels there aren’t enough credible parts for women in Hollywood.

The 40-year-old star shares, “For a few years, I was a little bit lost as an artist not being able to find what I wanted to do. I wanted to play dynamic women, and be part of stories that would allow me to explore all the doubts and anxieties that I was facing in my own life and that most women go through.”

Films like Wild and Mud took her in that direction and merely intensified her ambitions. That led her to produce and star in Big Little Lies, the HBO seven-part series based on the eponymous bestseller by Australian novelist Liane Moriarty. Centred around a trio of struggling mothers in an affluent seaside town in California (see ‘Not Just Wives & Girlfriends’), the series offers poignant and often humorous insights into issues that affect women. Reese shares, “It’s a unique pleasure to be able to come to other women with a piece of material I feel deeply proud of and excited to see their performance. We need to create more series and movies that treat women in a realistic way and enable female audiences to see themselves and identify with modern, complex female characters.

“Reading the novel for the first time – it was like I saw myself in different stages of motherhood all through my life. I was a mother at 22, I’ve been divorced, I’ve been re-married... The book and characters showed every spectrum and colour of a woman’s life.”