How Reese Witherspoon became the most powerful woman in Hollywood

In 2011, Reese Witherspoon received a script that made her question her future in Hollywood. At 35, she had distinguished credits including Election, Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama, and had scooped a Best Actress Oscar for her 2006 portrayal of a steely June Carter Cash in the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line.

Yet she found herself leafing through a script peppered with brash male characters and female ones whose primary identity was that they were someone’s girlfriend. Witherspoon called her agent to say that she wasn’t interested.

Her agent pushed back. “He told me every actress in Hollywood wants one of these parts,” she has since said. “There were [roles for] two women and they were both deplorable, disgusting, horrible.” Witherspoon has never identified the film, although she has confirmed that it was released in cinemas.

Frustrated, Witherspoon organised meetings with a string of top Hollywood executives to figure out why there was a dearth of interesting female leads of a certain age, but their responses were depressing. “One even said to me, ‘We have a movie with a woman at the centre of it, but we’re not going to make two this year’,” she later revealed.

Jim Toth, then a top talent agent and Witherspoon’s second husband (now filing for divorce citing “irreconcilable differences”), suggested his wife use her love of reading – Witherspoon is known to race through three to four books a week – to generate ideas for films that she’d be excited to star in.

In 2012, she launched production company Pacific Standard and optioned her first two books: Wild, a grief memoir by Cheryl Strayed, and Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s psychological thriller. She starred in Wild and cast Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. Both became instant box-office hits and earned Witherspoon and Pike Oscar nominations for Best Actress.

Now a 47-year-old mother of three, Witherspoon is one of the most powerful women in Hollywood. Pacific Standard rebranded as a bigger digital media company Hello Sunshine in 2016, and has produced a string of hit TV shows that have dominated both streaming platforms and the zeitgeist with their female-driven plots, glossy aesthetics and A-list ensemble casts.

Reese Witherspoon in Wild. Photo / supplied

These include Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, as well as literary adaptations such as Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, Where The Crawdads Sing (Hello Sunshine’s first film released in cinemas) and the recent Amazon Prime series Daisy Jones & The Six.

This month has seen the release of two more Hello Sunshine productions, agony aunt drama Tiny Beautiful Things on Disney+, and Apple TV’s mystery thriller The Last Thing He Told Me, starring Jennifer Garner.

In the pipeline is a third Legally Blonde film, the Dolly Parton/James Patterson thriller Run, Rose, Run and, in a bizarre meeting of worlds, the company’s first UK-based project: a Channel 4 home improvement show called Bricking It, presented by Stacey Solomon.

Hello Sunshine has become such a juggernaut that Witherspoon sold a majority stake to private equity firm Blackstone for a reported US$900 million (NZ$1.45 billion) in 2021, though Witherspoon continues to oversee operations day-to-day.

Starring in many of Hello Sunshine’s own titles, Witherspoon’s own stock as an actress has soared, with reports she can now command over US$1m an episode for TV roles and many millions more for film projects. According to Forbes, she is the richest actress in the world with an estimated US$400m in the bank.

Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern in Big Little Lies. Photo / Supplied

“I can’t think of a bigger success story of the actress turned producer,” says Helen O’Hara, author of Women vs Hollywood.

Born in New Orleans and raised in Nashville, Witherspoon landed her first film role at just 14 when she was cast in the lead role of Robert Mulligan’s coming-of-age drama The Man in the Moon.

A bookish teenager, she enrolled at Stanford to study English literature but, as her acting career took off, she dropped out to move to LA. Her sharp intellect and ironclad self-belief made it unlikely that life in front of the camera would ever fully satisfy her. At the age of 27, she secured her first producer credit on Legally Blonde 2.

“There’s a girl power-style feminism that has been Reese’s image since Legally Blonde,” says Alice Leppert, co-editor of the journal Celebrity Studies. “[If you look at] Big Little Lies, it’s about women’s relationships, the way women build friendships and entanglements that do not necessarily revolve around men.”

Big Little Lies was Witherspoon’s third triumph as a producer. “I wasn’t being offered opportunities to grow my company until I got that third hit,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “A guy has one hit at Sundance, and he gets Jurassic World.”

Daisy Edgar-Jones in Where the Crawdads Sing. Photo / Supplied

What distinguishes Hello Sunshine from the myriad other actor-led companies springing up across Hollywood? “Hello Sunshine really understood a specific audience better than anyone at the studios understood that audience and had the skill to create productions crafted to them,” says Richard Rushfield, founder of Hollywood newsletter The Ankler.

“Reese created a definable, familiar and likeable persona through her onscreen roles and then she created a series of products that seemed to spring from that persona.”

Witherspoon’s fans are given intimate access to this persona via her book club, which she launched in 2017 and for which she hosts recommendation videos and author interviews on Instagram, filmed in her vast beach house-style home to her 2.7 million followers.

Much like Oprah Winfrey’s book club, it has the power to forever change an author’s fortune, while serving as a useful testing ground for Hello Sunshine adaptations.

“And, of course, it helps those books on to the bestseller list, increasing the value of the TV show,” says O’Hara. According to Publishers Weekly, Delia Owens’ Where The Crawdads Sing sold 189,000 copies in its first three months. Once it became pick of the month in Reese’s Book Club a year later, sales spiked to over one million.

The odd cloud hovers over the Hello Sunshine story. The film adaptation of Owens’ book was widely panned by critics, as was this year’s Netflix rom-com Your Place or Mine and The Last Thing He Told Me. The company has also been criticised for focusing its projects on the lives of white, suburban women.

“The problem is that this company has grown and has a lot of mouths to feed now, which means you have to do a lot of stuff,” says Rushfield. “It gets harder to maintain quality control. It’s the natural cycle of entertainment companies, but I think Hello Sunshine still has a fair amount of credibility left to burn.”

What is inevitable, says O’Hara, is that “Reese’s career is going to keep getting bigger”.

Sam Claflin and Riley Keough in Daisy Jones & The Six. Photo / AP

Reese’s pieces: her biggest hits

Big Little Lies (2017-2019) Based on Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel, Witherspoon produced and starred in this smash HBO miniseries about a group of Californian women caught up in a murder investigation, which scooped up eight Emmys. The tone channelled Desperate Housewives by way of LA Confidential and its cast, which spanned Nicole Kidman to Meryl Streep, was a who’s who of Hollywood.

The Morning Show (2019-2023) Apple TV+’s first hit, Witherspoon starred in and executive produced this sparky comedy drama set on a primetime TV talk show. It wasn’t quite as sharp as it could have been, but it nevertheless launched Apple’s reputation for making compulsively watchable TV.

Little Fires Everywhere (2020) Beautiful homes, sleazeball men, female friendship sundered … you could probably spot this as a Witherspoon property a mile off. Yet as producer and star, she spun Celeste Ng’s pacy thriller into TV gold.

Where The Crawdads Sing (2022) Yes, critics derided it as Southern-fried bunkum, but audiences didn’t care. Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones’ first big-screen role took US$140m at the box office – another success for a Witherspoon-produced property.

Daisy Jones & The Six (2023) Witherspoon executive-produced the first 10 episodes of this Amazon Prime smash, about a tempestuous rock band in the 1970s.