This weekend, Reese Witherspoon gathered up all of her friends for her Hello Sunshine media company’s first-ever Shine Away event, which was basically just… an opportunity for Witherspoon to gather up all of her friends—including Jennifer Garner, Mindy Kaling, and Tracee Ellis Ross (plus women who aren’t on the front-facing side of the entertainment industry)—and have them talk about their lives and their work and their philosophies about life and work.
Naturally, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Witherspoon also talked about those things and what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood, but at one point she made an interesting observation about her career and what kinds of things people expect from her. “I’m not meant to be doing dark, heavy, intense, horror, gore, darkness movies,” she suggested, adding, “People like to see me do light movies.”
There are a few interesting things about this, starting with the fact that she specifically says “movies,” which means Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Morning Show (which is arguably dark, right?) apparently don’t count. Does she hold movies in a different regard than television? That’s interesting, if so! But at the same time, she doesn’t say this is how she has always approached her acting, just that it’s something she has realized about her career, which means she’s not necessarily disavowing a movie like Devil’s Knot, for example, but perhaps she recognized that she gets better feedback when she’s playing a singing pig or Elle Woods.
In the end, though, Witherspoon has made peace with all of this, saying that choosing only to make “light movies” won’t “put you in the cool kids club,” but she doesn’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,” she said. And, really, isn’t not caring if you’re cool the coolest thing of all?
