Reese Witherspoon Realized “People Like to See Me Do Light Movies” – The Hollywood Reporter

For her part, Garner remembered “going through a very public, very hard moment in my life; [Witherspoon] was right there, and the way I needed to get through it was dance cardio and I dance cardio’d so hard we broke her foot but she kept going.” Kaling recalled working with Witherspoon on a movie where she floated the idea of having children by herself as a single woman, and Witherspoon told her to do it.

“That’s a scary thing to embark on and sometimes you need that person. I think we see Reese as an entertainer, she’s obviously so funny and so talented, but as a friend, the person who can tell you tough things and you believe her because you’ve been through so much and you’re incredibly open about it,” Kaling said. Garner also spoke about Hollywood actresses uniting for meetings at Witherspoon’s house during the Time’s Up movement: “It was the first time I’d ever sat down with that many actresses in the same room that we weren’t like passing each other at an awards show in big dresses, where we just sat. We’d been siloed off; the one place that doesn’t happen, the place that started the change where that no longer can happen, is Hello Sunshine.”

Witherspoon also discussed her approach to choosing her projects, saying she came to a realization that, “I’m not meant to be doing dark, heavy, intense, horror, gore, darkness movies. People like to see me do light movies, and I was like, OK. It doesn’t put you in the cool kids club a lot but I don’t care, I don’t want to be in the cool kids club. I want to make optimistic stuff that makes girls excited to be women in this world, because it is a wonderful thing to be a woman in this world.” Kaling teased that “B.J. Novak says it’s not a Mindy Kaling show unless there’s a man running shirtless in slow motion. And you know what, I’ve been so used to the male gaze my entire life that yes, I will look at a handsome torso. And I want to provide that for you.”

Later in the program, Witherspoon sat down for a fireside chat with Ross, after the two also became close during the Time’s Up movement. Ross spoke about her decade-long journey to launch her hair product company, Pattern Beauty, and how she finds balance in her life outside of business and her acting career.

“When you are single and don’t have kids, you really have to be conscious about curating what you want around you when you want to be happy, or you’ll just stay in your house or you’ll just spend your whole time working — neither works,” Ross said. “I don’t look for balance because I think it’s impossible, but I look for harmony. So it’s a sense of how the waves move: sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small. Sometimes there’s more work, sometimes there’s less.”

Witherspoon admitted she’s been trying hard to find balance outside of work, explaining, “I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled, like work has always been my bomb. And I started to realize that isn’t going to work for me; about a year ago I was like, ‘I was a robot and the robot broke.’”

The star said she texted Ross at this time and realized that amid all her work and family duties, “it’s really important to remember that you have to be the glue that holds yourself together,” adding that at the time, “I didn’t feel like I was taking very good care of myself and I wasn’t asking other people for help.”

The Shine Away event was put on in partnership with AT&T and also welcomed Lindsey Vonn, Kerri Walsh Jennings, and authors Curtis Sittenfeld, Jasmine Guillory and Laura Dave.