She’d come to interview me for Hello Sunshine, her production
company’s editorial site, and when the interview was nished, our
events manager asked Witherspoon if she’d be willing to have
her picture taken with one of our shop dogs, Mary Todd Lincoln,
a dappled, silky dachshund who’d been photographed with any
number of celebrities in the past. It’s Nashville, after all; it’s the
kind of thing we do here. Witherspoon took the little dog and
tucked her into an open space in the bookshelf behind her, then
proceeded to run the gamut of human emotion: joy, surprise,
eagerness, love, suering, hope—spinning out a master class
of acting in less than a minute. The amazing part was not how
good Witherspoon was at this—she’s a very good actor—the
amazing part was how she managed to shine the enormous light
of her talent onto a nine-pound dog. In frame after frame, the
viewer’s eye skips the movie star and goes straight to the dachs-
hund, which rst appears coy, then knowing, then resplendent.
If Oscars were given to pups, everyone would have agreed that
this was Mary Todd Lincoln’s year.
Which is pretty much the point I want to make about Reese
Witherspoon.
B
OILED DOWN TO a series of brightly colored
squares on a board game, Witherspoon’s career
would look something like this: success as a
teenager, including a starring role in The Man
in the Moon at 15 , then at 23 an indelible perfor-
mance as the irritatingly determined Tracy Flick in Election,
then full-blown stardom at 25 for the even more indelible Elle
Woods in Legally Blonde, then an Oscar at 29 for playing June
Carter Cash in Walk the Line.
And after that? Well, after that things zzled. Maybe success
wasn’t a good t with her scrappy, driven nature, or maybe by
looking for more roles as rich and complex as June Carter Cash
she was essentially looking for polar bears in Los Angeles. They
simply weren’t there. The years that followed yielded nothing
particularly memorable, and in 2012 , The New Yorker ung her on
the ash heap of has-beens, in a cutting sentence, deep in a prole
of another actor, laundry listing stars who were no longer stars.
Reese Witherspoon was ocially washed up at the age of 36.
Thirty-six is ancient for a gymnast, late for a model, midlife
for an opera singer, nascent for a surgeon, and fuzzy for a
female actor. Many talented women have been chewed up
and spit out by 36 , while a lucky few keep going. At this point
in the story of Witherspoon’s career, there was no guarantee
of professional longevity.
Here she gives a great deal of the credit to her husband, Jim
Toth, for helping her reimagine her job. She and Toth, her sec-
ond husband, have a seven-year-old son named Tennessee. Toth
had been a very successful talent agent at CAA and was recently
named head of talent and acquisitions for Quibi, Jerey Katzen-
berg’s mobile video start-up. (I throw this in to highlight the fact
that the marriage of Witherspoon and Toth includes two people
who stay ahead of the curve.) He told her that if she wasn’t nd-
ing the roles she wanted, she needed to develop them herself.
If she felt like betting, she should bet on herself. If she felt
like ghting, she was the one she should ght for. Toth also
pointed out what should have been comically obvious to his
wife: that she reads more than anyone he had ever known.
Reading is one of Witherspoon’s superpowers. She is fascinat-
ed by stories, whether in books, in lm, in dinner party conversa-
tion. She wants to tell stories, and she wants to encourage other
people to tell them. “I always knew from the time I was seven
that I wanted to be a storyteller or an actor or a singer,” she says.
“Or a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. I think that’s why I’m
in awe of writers because I’ve tried to sit down and do it. I have
ideas for stories all the time. I could nev-
er gure out how things ended. I always
have ideas about how things begin but I
never know how they end.”
Sometimes, a strong beginning is all
it takes. When Witherspoon decided to
start a production company with her own
money, she turned to her constant com-
panions: books. She optioned the rights
to two novels that had yet to be published.
The rst, Gone Girl, she produced, and the
second, Wild, she produced and starred
in. (Wild yielded Academy Award nomi-
nations for both Witherspoon and Laura
Dern, who played her mother.) Then
she optioned a novel by Liane Moriarty
called Big Little Lies. After that, no one
was questioning Witherspoon’s ability to
spin paper into gold.
In the middle of this new period of
success, she also started a book club,
becoming something of a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket for a
number of books. “It’s nice to highlight authors who don’t
have a track record of selling a lot of books. To watch what hap-
pens to them is extraordinary, and really emotional for us.” But
nding those authors and just the right book requires a boat-
load of reading month after month. Where does an actor who
is—once again, or still—heading the A-list, who has a thrivingI rst met
REESE WITHERSPOON three years
ago at Parnassus Books,
the store I co-own
in Nashville.
Left: dress by Prada;
necklaces by COMME
des GARÇONS
MIKIMOTO; bra by
Fleur du Mal.
Right: gown by
Giambattista Valli
Haute Couture;
sandals by
Giambattista Valli.GOWN GIRL
Dress by Givenchy.60 VANITY FAIR APRIL 2020