Leave it to Reese Witherspoon to show you what female empowerment is. Witherspoon's best movies have shown her playing characters who know what they want and don’t need a man to shape them into their best versions. About a decade ago, the Oscar winner called out a common trope found in scripts that’s now going viral, reflecting on how being “irritated” fueled her success as a producer.
Reese Witherspoon clearly doesn’t read a script without noticing elements that could be interpreted as demeaning to women. After all, a viral TikTok that now has 913.5K views shows the Legally Blonde actress' 2015 speech for Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards. She mentioned a common trope said by female characters that truly irked her to her core:
‘What do we do now?!’ Seriously, I'm not kidding. Go back and watch any movie, and you'll see this line over and over. You’re gonna see it now, I’m telling you! [...] Do you know any woman in any crisis situation who has [...] absolutely no idea what to do? I mean, don’t they tell women? They tell people in crisis, little children, that if you’re in trouble, talk to a woman. It’s ridiculous that a woman wouldn’t know what to do.
The Golden Globe winner is spot on! Now I can’t hear that line the same way anymore, and that’s good because it opens your eyes to the sexism that existed in earlier films that were considered the norm. It could be because way back when, men were considered the heroes of big movies while women accompanied the men on their mission as love interests or damsels in distress. Now we have so many women who’ve led blockbusters with their amazing performances that we shouldn’t keep hearing this line in today’s day.
Despite Reese Witherspoon’s Glamour Women of the Year speech being from about a decade ago, it still doesn’t mean the Man In the Moon actress doesn’t think about that moment. To promote her new LinkedIn page about what she learned in storytelling, the Pleasantville actress posted an Instagram video that now has 1.4 million views throwing back to moments in 2024 when she spoke of female empowerment. Here’s what she said in an episode of Melinda French Gates’ “Moments That Make Us” series:
I want to see women as survivors. Because we are. What I’m always stunned by is women’s resilience. The women inside those scripts were just either the wife or the girlfriend of somebody, but not the lead character. I started getting really irritated. There isn’t a woman who hasn’t saved herself at some point in her life.
Fortunately, Reese Witherspoon used her irritation to create her own production company, Hello Sunshine, to produce movies that show women on screen as the survivors they truly are. Her push for making movies about women for women came from when she read one script that was offensive to her of two women fighting over a “goofball” guy that “had all of these boob jokes in it.”
After discovering a bunch of studios not developing anything with a female lead, Reese Witherspoon decided to take matters into her own hands and create Pacific Standard (later called Hello Sunshine). It may have faced some early struggles, but collaborating to come up with a business plan helped her movies become ultimate successes. You can watch Witherspoon’s Instagram video in full below:
So, what did Reese Witherspoon “do now” after seeing many female characters rely on men for help? She made her own production company to show women as self-reliant beings with their own missions. Whether Hello Sunshine has Witherspoon starring in Wild as a hiker being her own healer, or producing Where the Crawdads Sing, which shows a young woman raising herself in a marshland, we need more female empowerment films to make it big in theaters. You can watch the 2025 movie release of Hello Sunshine’s You’re Cordially Invited coming to your Amazon Prime subscription on January 30th.
