Reese Witherspoon Recalls How She “Couldn’t Keep the Lights On” in Early Days of Production Company Despite ‘Big Little Lies,’ ‘Gone Girl’ Success
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media company held its second annual Shine Away conference on Saturday, featuring plenty of face time with the star and her A-list friends.
After welcoming the 700 guests to Los Angeles’ Nya Studios for the event — comprised of two days of panels, activations and programming aimed at empowering and connecting women — Witherspoon sat down for a conversation with Laura Dern and Octavia Spencer. The trio chatted about their close relationship and how they have supported each other in and outside of the industry, with Dern joking, “Basically I run everything by Reese, from my romantic life all the way to what jobs I should do.”
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Witherspoon — who in the last few years has produced a slew of projects including The Morning Show, The Last Thing He Told Me, Tiny Beautiful Things, Truth Be Told and Daisy Jones & The Six — spoke about her early days of producing, starting Hello Sunshine at 34 years old despite admitting she didn’t know what she was doing.
Explaining that she had spent her first two decades in Hollywood just hustling and trying to get jobs, she said, “I didn’t have time to look at the bigger macro, like, what is our business? How are they making money? Wait, why are there no parts for women? Wait, why am I not seeing any people of color behind the scenes? Like, why am I not seeing any writers who are bringing a different perspective? And that’s what made me think. When I was 34 I had enough foundation under myself, inside our business; I also had enough money to help start funding, and I was like, I’m not going to take money from people who don’t want the change that I want to see.”
Still, Witherspoon admitted, “It was scary because I didn’t know if I was going to get my money back. Every day I woke up thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m not gonna get my money back.’ But I would rather bet on myself and lose that money trying hard. I woke up every single day and I was like, ‘I am my own lottery ticket.'”
The star also looked back to a moment after the success of 2017’s Big Little Lies, which landed 16 Emmy nominations and eight wins — after she produced both Gone Girl and Wild in 2014.
“I had a moment right after Big Little Lies — I had self-funded my first company and I thought, OK well, Big Little Lies won all these Emmys and Wild and Gone Girl got all these Oscar nominations, and we made $600 million at the box office. I had four employees, and I couldn’t keep the lights on,” Witherspoon recalled. “I remember the accountant calling me, going, ‘You didn’t make enough money producing those three things to keep four employees.’ So I was like, ‘I’m doing something wrong.’ And that’s when I had this aha moment. I was like, I need to have help. I don’t have a business plan.” Hello Sunshine soon brought on Sarah Harden as CEO, helping Witherspoon build an infrastructure and hire execs.
Dern also noted how the female-centered atmosphere on Big Little Lies allowed the stars to have conversations they hadn’t before, as she remembered standing with Witherspoon and co-star Meryl Streep “and we started talking about money, and I said, ‘I have to tell you, this is the first time I’ve ever had anybody to talk to.’ And I was going through a vulnerable time and raising kids on my own and had so many questions, and the advice I got from you was, you need a financial advisor who’s a woman to talk to about these things. And our first conversation was about taking care of elder parents and getting kids through school and nobody had ever had these conversations with me.”
Dern added that her relationships with her fellow actresses “are the greatest love stories, but they told us that we weren’t going to get along so better just to have one woman in the room.”
“That’s the thing — they told us that as women, collectively on a set, the reason why there’s usually only one of you, is that you guys are competitive. And I found it to be the opposite of that when there are multiple women on the set,” Spencer echoed, shouting out her longtime friendships with Melissa McCarthy, Allison Janney and Viola Davis.
Witherspoon explained how consumers and audiences can also support female creators, emphasizing, “When there’s a show on Netflix or whatever, just push the ‘like’ button — You don’t know how important that ‘like’ button is. Just ‘like it,’ because that actually affects the salaries of the women who made it. They run all that data… Even put it in your watch list, that little behavior” is valuable.
After the panel, Witherspoon took part in a conversation with Spanx founder Sara Blakely about running their two female-led businesses; she again looked back on the early days of Hello Sunshine, noting, “I had a really hard time understanding why once I had one successful movie and then another successful movie, why people weren’t understanding that this isn’t just a fluke. My first two books that I optioned were Gone Girl and Wild, and they both went No. 1 within three months of my optioning them. And people were like, ‘Yeah, but can you do it again?'”
Witherspoon continued that when she and Kidman optioned Big Little Lies, one of the financial backers called her manager right before shooting to ask, “Do you really think this is going to work, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman in this television show? Because we’re taking a big risk here.” She added, “It turned out to be this amazing thing that wasn’t just something women wanted to watch, men wanted to watch as well.”
Olivia Munn, Amanda Kloots, comedian Heather McMahan and athletes Diana Flores, Alex Morgan and Candace Parker also took part in Saturday’s event, with a musical performance by The Castellows; Naomi Watts will take the stage on Sunday. The second annual Shine Away was connected by AT&T.
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