Toronto: Reese Witherspoon Talks Female Empowerment, Saying No to Sexual Shame
Wild wasn’t just the most physically challenging role of Reese Witherspoon’s career. It also offered the actress an opportunity to have a frank discussion about sexuality with her 15-year-old daughter.
“There’s a lot of explicit sex scenes in this movie,” Witherspoon said during a Mavericks conversation Sunday night at the Toronto Film Festival. “And she’s like, ‘Oh no!’ ”
In a wide-ranging discussion, which took place at Glenn Gould Studio, the actress talked about tackling Jean-Marc Vallee’s film — based on a best-selling memoir by Cheryl Strayed — as well her role in another Toronto film, Philippe Falardeau’s The Good Lie.
She said there’s a lesson in Wild, which centers on a sexually daring woman who overcomes a string of personal tragedies by hiking more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. The lesson: Young girls are conditioned to feel shame about their sexuality, and that’s not OK.
“It’s such an important message about female sexuality,” she said. “We kissed that guy or we had sex with that dude in college. We’re totally ashamed of so many things. I think this movie says, ‘That’s OK. Maybe I was meant to sleep with all those guys. Maybe I wanted to. Maybe if I could go back and do it all again, I’d do the same thing.’ It’s a total liberation, especially for young women.”
Witherspoon talked about her own youth as the daughter of a doctor father and a nurse mother and how she thought she was destined to be a doctor until she saw a casting notice at the age of 14 for Robert Mulligan’s The Man in the Moon. She landed the part, which led eventually to her breakout role as Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne’s Election, which she dubbed “a huge flop.”
“Election cost $10 million and made $11 million,” Witherspoon said. “It was actually a huge flop. A critical success but a huge flop.”
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