I'm Tired Of Seeing Talented Women Playing Thankless Parts

Once condemned to rom-com hell, Reese Witherspoon is now one of the most important women in movie-making, revolutionising the way women are treated in Hollywood. She talks about love, loss and the turning point in her career that changed everything.

Even though she’s long been one of Hollywood’s most beloved and well-respected stars, Reese Witherspoon has struggled to overcome her image as an effervescent southern belle. Best known as a rom-com queen, she felt frustrated and despondent with her career when – despite winning an Oscar for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line in 2006 – she couldn’t convince the studios to allow her to play the serious parts she craved.

“For a few years, I was a little bit lost as an artist, not being able to find what I wanted to do and making choices that I wasn’t ultimately very happy with,” says Reese. “I wanted to play dynamic women and be part of stories that would allow me to explore all the doubts and anxieties I was facing in my own life and that most women go through.”

Films like the biographical survival drama Wild (2014) and coming-of-age drama Mud (2012) took her in that direction and intensified her ambitions. That led her to produce and star in Big Little Lies, the acclaimed seven part series based on the best-seller by Australian novelist Liane Moriarty now streaming on Sky’s Neon channel. Centred around a trio of mothers in an affluent seaside town along the coast of California, the series offers poignant and often humorous insights into issues that affect women and which are vitally important to Reese, now 41. She was excited to be producing a show with such strong female leads.

“It’s a unique pleasure to be able to come to other women with a piece of material I feel deeply proud of,” she says. “These are the kinds of things that shift consciousness... We need to create more series and movies that treat women in a realistic way and enable female audiences in particular to see themselves and identify with modern, complex female characters.