Reese Witherspoon is hoping that her career successes not only inspire but create more opportunities for women.
In an interview with Kristen Bell and Monica Padman on the We Are Supported By podcast on Audacy, the 45-year-old actress opened up about navigating a male-dominated industry.
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On Friday’s episode, the “Big Little Lies” star recalled a 2015 article from Time magazine while addressing the topic of “women staying in their lane.”
The article in question featured a demeaning caricature of her and other successful women at the height of their career, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Blake Lively, Lauren Conrad, and Jessica Alba. The headline called them “Hollywood's New Domestic Divas.”
"I had started a clothing business. Gwyneth was really growing Goop. Blake Lively had a business, Jessica Alba had a business and they did a caricature cartoon of all of us," she said.
She added: “We were in ballgowns and they stuck our heads on, and Jessica was holding an iron and I was holding a vacuum cleaner.”
“The whole thing was so offensive that I burst into tears,” she admitted.
Witherspoon revealed that while the magazine has since apologized, she believes that it is part of a larger issue that still needs to be “course-corrected.”
"I'm not even talking about 10 years ago. I'm talking about 2015 when we decided, OK we’re going to be entrepreneurial, take a swing, invest our own money, our own time, our own reputation and try to do something that George Clooney has done, Robert De Niro has done — and getting lampooned for it. That message to little girls is: 'If you've had success in one area, you can't have success in another,” she explained.
She hopes that going forward, more women take on leadership roles
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"I consciously went about this about six, seven years going, ‘I’m going to self-fund this company because I want to own this company," she said of her production company, Hello Sunshine, which she sold to private equity firm Blackstone for nearly $1 billion dollars earlier this month.
"I just wanted to tell stories and all I ever knew in movies was just to be an actress," Witherspoon explained. "No one was encouraging us to be directors or writers because nobody was out there. There was Nora Ephron. There was Nancy Meyers. And then, I didn't know anybody else. That was impossible."
She noted that being honest about what she wanted helped her find her “purpose.”
"I didn't know what my purpose was — and your purpose changes too. You get older and your purpose keeps changing. You have to keep iterating. You have to keep progressing. You have to look at new media and go, 'Wait, is there a place for me to stand in a position of leadership here?' Because I've been doing this for 30 years. I actually know a lot of stuff and I really want to be helpful to the next generation of women, to my own generation of women who haven't been well served by our business,” she explained.
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Witherspoon also recalled struggling as a new mom when she welcomed Ava, now 21, in 1999.
“I did not have a lot of support with my first baby and I learned really early, like, this is not going to work,” the “Legally Blonde” actress said.
“I tried to muscle through for five months with Ava, just not sleeping and I became delirious.”
She admitted that she wasn’t able to work during this time, but was “lucky enough to have money saved.”
She soon realized just how true the statement “it takes a village” really is.
“It’s just not a one-person job,” Witherspoon said, adding, “I would even say it’s not a two-person job.”
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