Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon has revealed that being offered the part of “girlfriend in a dumb comedy” was the final straw that pushed her into producing.
The 39-year-old, who produced successful films Wild and Gone Girl, said she was so frustrated by Oscar-winning females fighting it out for poor roles that she started buying the rights to books herself.
“About four years ago, I got sent a script and it was just awful. It was just a terrible script, and this male star was starring in it, and there was a girlfriend part. And I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. No, I’m not interested,’” she told Entertainment Weekly.
“They said, ‘Well, this actress is chasing it, that actress is chasing it.’ Like, three Oscar winners and two huge box office leading ladies. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s where we’re at? This is where we’re at?’ You’re fighting to be the girlfriend in a dumb comedy? For what?’
“And by the way, two Oscar winners did it. I was like, ‘I’ve got to do something.’”
Witherspoon was speaking alongside Eva Longoria, Kerry Washington and Elizabeth Banks at a Beyond Beautiful round table about quality in Hollywood.
She confessed it was her husband Jim Toth telling her “talking doesn’t change anything” that convinced her to buy the rights to books and start turning them into movies.
But despite her box office pulling power and connections, Witherspoon said she still came up against studio bosses “who have given half a million dollars to a big male movie star to run his own company, but won’t pay a woman to do the same thing”.
She railed that the movie executives wouldn’t give her any funding to develop her ideas, “but they want to acquire everything I’m doing with my own money”.
Witherspoon is now starring and producing a new comedy called Big Little Lies alongside Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgard.
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