When I tell her I watched her acceptance speech for the
Sherry Lansing Leadership Award, the rst thing she wants to
know is if I watched Kerry Washington’s introduction. Well,
she asked me that after taking several minutes to praise Sher-
ry Lansing’s leadership. Washington and Witherspoon are
making a limited series out of Celeste Ng’s smash novel Little
Fires Everywhere, about privilege, class, race, motherhood, and
ownership, with Witherspoon in the role of Mrs. Richardson,
a paragon of oblivious entitlement. “Creating that character
was a new challenge for me,” Witherspoon says. “Despite her
intelligence and social grooming, she has a deeply embed-
ded lack of awareness of her privilege. She’s constructed a
life that’s impervious to the world she lives in. She’s so com-
fortable in her social standing and her wealth that she feels
entitled to analyze anyone outside her sphere but never takes
a hard look at her own shortcomings.”
Or to put it another way, this character is about as far from
the actor as she could get.
“Watch Kerry,” she tells me. “What she says about power is
so important.”
And she’s right. Washington’s speech is a perfect encapsula-
tion of Witherspoon’s journey and the change in Hollywood.
“The new narrative,” Washington says, shimmering from the
lectern, “the Reese narrative, tells us that our power lies in
our partnership. That real power comes from succeeding with
people, not succeeding o of people. That real power is borne
of the humility and grace of sisterhood. That’s what empower-
ment means. The more power you share, the more power you
have, and the more power you have, the more you must share.
This is the lesson that you must learn when you are in Reese’s
orbit. This is the lesson so many of us are learning from her.”T
HE HBO SERIES Big Little Lies began its addic-
tive spin in February 2017 and quickly became
as much the story of ive women living with
privilege and abuse in scenic Monterey as it
did about the ve actors who were nally get-
ting a chance to work together. When Witherspoon found out
that Nicole Kidman’s production company was also inter-
ested in the Moriarty novel, she moved to partner instead of
outbid. Witherspoon and Kidman joined forces, taking joint
executive producer credits and equal starring roles. Read an
interview with Dern and she’ll talk about how much she loved
getting to work with Witherspoon, then Witherspoon is quot-
ed praising season-two addition Meryl Streep, who has nice
things to say about Kidman. They all loved the younger wom-
en, Shailene Woodley and Zoë Kravitz, who in turn learned
so much from their elders.
If all of them are acting their way through these interviews,
well, they’re extremely convincing. Those reliable tropes
about bitchery and catghts, about women undercutting oth-
er women, are suddenly rendered useless. All reports point to
the genuine shared aection and respect among the cast. And
those other tropes about men not being interested in watch-
ing shows about women, and shows about women not being
protable? Big Little Lies blew those up as well.
So while the show wasn’t responsible for the #MeToo move-
ment, the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, or any of the otherWitherspoon is happy to talk about money and contracts.
She believes in the power of information, because if other
women don’t know how much you’re being paid, the only
person who stands to benet is the person who’s writing the
checks. She has a group of friends she talks to regularly in order
to share information, a list that includes and is in no way lim-
ited to America Ferrera, Shonda Rhimes, Tracee Ellis Ross, Ava
DuVernay, Nancy Meyers, and Laura Dern.
“You know, you meet people, you’re friends with people, but
I say about a few women in my life, they are my sisters. I don’t
have a sister and I found my sister in Laura. No one makes me
laugh like Laura. She’s magical.”
“Reese is a miracle,” Dern says. “She is the gold standard
of what it means to be a champion. She has always been a
champion of art, and other artists, as well as friends and
family. But discovering how she will never stop until other
women are honored for their voices and their skills with not
only a seat at the table, but paid and paid well for it, is a rare
marvel. Because of her, so many other women in positions
of power have followed suit. As an only child, nding family
has always been very important to me. And that I get her
in both areas of my life—personal and professional—is an
outrageous blessing.”
Witherspoon has a way of using every question as a means
of highlighting someone else, and in her case it feels less like
deection and more like a genuine sense of wonder for every-
thing and everyone who moves her. I tell her the thing I nd so
remarkable about her story is that she was pregnant when Elec-
tion came out, that she had a baby at 23. I can’t think of anyone
else who had success as a young actor, had a baby at the same
time, and didn’t get derailed.
“Kate Winslet,” she says, without acknowledging my aston-
ishment. “She was 25. She had a baby after Titanic. We talked
all the time.”
“I always say,
‘FUNNY DOESN’T
SAG .’ I always just
wanted to be funny, you
know? You CAN’T
BE RENDERED
OBSOLETE if you just
keep being funny.”
64 VANITY FAIR