Hulu Series ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Sets Lynn Shelton to Direct
Lynn Shelton has signed on to direct and executive produce the upcoming Hulu limited series “Little Fires Everywhere” starring Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, and Rosemarie DeWitt, Variety has learned exclusively.
Shelton will direct four of the series’ eight episodes, including the premiere and finale. Her previous credits include seven features, including “Humpday,” Laggies,” “Outside In,” and the upcoming “Sword of Trust” with Marc Maron, which bows in July. On the TV side, she has directed episodes of shows like “GLOW,” “Mad Men,” and Apple’s upcoming drama “The Morning Show,” which also stars Witherspoon. Shelton has also previously collaborated with DeWitt on the films “Your Sister’s Sister” and “Touchy Feely.”
She is repped by UTA and Anonymous Content.
Based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestseller of the same name, “Little Fires Everywhere” follows the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. Liz Tigelaar created the series and serves as showrunner. The series is produced by Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, Washington’s Simpson Street, and ABC Signature Studios.
This is the third time Tigelaar and Shelton will be partnering for a series. Shelton directed for Hulu’s “Casual,” on which Tigelaar served as showrunner. The two also have “LA Woman,” inspired by the memoirs of Eve Babitz, in development at Hulu.
“I love watching myself age on screen!” Reese Witherspoon on shattering ageing taboos & why she will never try fasting
Reese Witherspoon has become a flag bearer for feminism and equal opportunities in Hollywood and we couldn’t be more here for her. As her career goes from strength to strength, her empire grows from producing films – that put women at the focal point – to a full lifestyle company with Hello Sunshine. And, we are ALL preparing for the return of Big Little Lies, aren’t we? Tight lipped on the events of series two, Reese simply coyly confides, “you better get excited – it’s good!”
If that wasn’t enough, she will also star alongside Jennifer Aniston in Apple TV Plus’s main show, The Morning Show – and she’s produced it too. Her formidable work in film makes Reese the perfect placement as Elizabeth Arden’s Storyteller-in-chief. Are you tired just reading this? This woman is BUS-AY!
Here Reese opens up about how we can further the conversation around beauty and feminism, her foil proof (AND FREE) beauty hack and why beauty is so important to her self-care rituals…
How do you use beauty to empower you?
I love lipstick – I always have a lot of lipstick in my purse. I really feel like a strong bold colour really pulls me together and helps me put my best face towards the world. I really like a strong red like the ‘Red Door’ tone from Elizabeth Arden. I am really enjoying the new Limited-Edition Beautiful Colour Moisturising Lipstick in ‘Pink Punch’ this summer because pink is the new red (laughs!). It just makes me feel like I am ready to face the day. I feel like it finishes a great outfit, just like a great accessory.
A lot of beauty interviews with female celebrities can be quite sexist and reductive. How do you think we can further the conversation around beauty and feminism?
First of all, I want to acknowledge that this is a great question! There has been such an elevation about the way we talk about women and beauty, but we can always go further. For so many years, as young women growing up, we were just presented with one beauty standard. Now it’s so empowering for women to see themselves represented in beauty campaigns, Instagram and influencers who have all kinds of backgrounds. There’s a lot of body positivity messaging, too. I am particularly love Jameela Jamil who is addressing the way we talk to women in advertising and the importance of really seeing beauty as a universal thing, that is accessible to many with broader messaging.
The One Product That Transformed Reese Witherspoon’s Skin
Picking a single favorite Reese Witherspoon look from the past 20 years of her Hollywood fame is like picking your favorite dessert, or lipstick, or breed of puppy, or child.
Those retro waves at the 2001 Golden Globes? To die for. Her hot pink lip at the 2016 Oscars? When are we not trying to recreate? Those perfect bangs at the 2007 Golden Globes? We bring a picture of them to our hairstylist every four weeks.
Witherspoon, an Elizabeth Arden spokesperson, knows a lot about beauty from her years as a red carpet icon — which is why we were thrilled to sit down with her this week to talk all things hair, makeup, and skin. She walks us through her biggest beauty regrets, favorite budget buys, and the changing expectations around aging in Hollywood, ahead.
What is the best investment you made for your skin?
“Well, I have to say, I started using the [Elizabeth Arden] Retinol Ceramide Capsules like a year ago, and I had never used retinol before and it has really changed the tone of my skin. I used to have a really uneven tone.”
Do you have any favorite products you can grab from a CVS?
“Cetaphil. I use the face wash, and I travel with it. I like the Revlon eyelash curler; it’s as good as any eyelash curler I’ve ever used. I love drugstore makeup, too. I remember going as a little girl to the drugstore down the street from my grandmother’s house, and I’d spend hours looking at nail polish and lipstick and blush.”
What are your favorite beauty splurges?
“I had a facial the other day and it was so nice. I thought, I need to do this more often, so I might start getting facials. It was this “cryofacial” thing, where she used a cold thing on my face. It was fabulous.”
Over the years, do you have any beauty regrets? Any look from the past where you think back and cringe?
“I think in the ’90s when we did the thing where you had brown lipliner that was darker than my lipstick — that was an odd beauty moment. For some reason, I just took that one a long way. We also plucked our eyebrows really severely. I really wish I hadn’t plucked my eyebrows, but thank god they grew back.”
Millie Bobby Brown, Filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu Tackling ‘The Thing About Jellyfish’ for Universal
Millie Bobby Brown and Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu are teaming up to adapt acclaimed YA novel The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin.
Universal has optioned the rights to the 2015 book published by Little Brown and is developing the adaptation with producers Gigi Pritzker and Rachel Shane of MWM Studios, Bruna Papandrea, and Reese Witherspoon.
The producers have been developing the project since 2017, when MWM, the company behind the upcoming Motherless Brooklyn from Edward Norton and Chadwick Boseman’s 17 Bridges, acquired the rights, hiring playwright Molly Smith Metzler to work on what would be her first feature script, which made the 2017 Black List.
Jellyfish tells the story of a young girl named Suzy as she enters seventh grade. When her former best friend dies in a drowning accident — and not believing her mother who says that sometimes “these things happen” — Suzy becomes convinced that the true cause of the tragedy was a rare jellyfish sting. She retreats into a silent world of her imagination and begins crafting a globe-trotting plan to prove her theory, with the book exploring the ideas of life and death, the frailty of friendships and the potential of hope right next door.
The book was Benjamin’s debut novel. It was not only a commercial success, but also a literary smash, named as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
Brown is attached to play Suzy.
Adrian Alperovich and Melissa Rucker will executive produce on behalf of MWM Studios. Jeanne Snow will also exec produce. Senior exec vp production Erik Baiers and director of development Lexi Barta are overseeing on behalf of Universal.
Brown is one of the stars of Stranger Things, whose season three arrives July, and stars in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which hits the big-screen May 31. She is repped by WME and Hansen Jacobson.
Kahiu wrote and directed the LGBTQ film Rafiki, which made history last year as being the first Kenyan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival even as the movie was banned in her home country due to its themes. She is repped by CAA and Gotham Group.
Benjamin is repped by CAA while Metzler is repped by WME and Granview.
Starz to Develop ‘Kin’ Series With Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine banner has inked a deal with Starz to develop “Kin,” Variety has learned.
The multi-generational family drama comes from “Queen Sugar” and “Constantine” writer Davita Scarlett, who developed the project with Chester Jones III. Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine film and TV head Lauren Neustadter are on board as executive producers alongside Scarlett.
“The opportunity to work in partnership with Davita Scarlett as well as Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine on this series is serendipitous,” Starz president of programming Carmi Zlotnik said in a statement. “Hello Sunshine puts women at the forefront of the stories they are telling, and that fits perfectly into Starz’s overall programming strategy to offer compelling content that appeals to female audiences.”
Witherspoon described Scarlett’s script as “utterly original, complex, and incredibly nuanced.”
“She deftly explores issues around identity and the secrets family members keep to protect themselves and one another. I’m so excited to team up with Starz to bring these strong, memorable female characters to life on screen,” Witherspoon said.
On Friday, Reese and her Big Little Lies co-stars and writer David E. Kelley attended the Winter TCA Press Tour HBO Panel, to preview the upcoming 2nd season of their show. They talked about what we can expect from the new season, including that there will no longer be the ‘Greek chorus’ of characters commentating on events, that the tone is more dramatic, and that the focus is on dealing with the ‘trauma’ of what happened at the end of season 1. David E. Kelley commented that there is “no such plan” for a season 3. We’ve compiled a whole batch of tweets from the panel which you can read below, along with a couple of articles. Reese wore a simple but elegant blue dress by Michael Kors for the event. Find lots of high quality photos in our Gallery!
Universal Joins Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Abrams, Jordan Peele in Committing to Hiring Female Directors
Universal Pictures’ Peter Cramer, Focus Features’ Peter Kujawski and DreamWorks Animation’s Margie Cohn have committed to hiring at least one female director in the next 18 months as part of the 4% Challenge.
The development was announced Tuesday and comes in the wake of Time’s Up and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative launching the challenge on Jan. 25 at the Sundance Film Festival. The organization said on Monday that more than 50 high-profile Hollywood producers — including Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Abrams, and Jordan Peele — have committed to the 4% Challenge.
The initiative is part of the Timesupx2 campaign to double the number of women in leadership positions.
The name is derived from women having directed only 4% of the country’s top grossing movies over the past decade. Nina Jacobson, Paul Feig, Amy Schumer, Angela Robinson, and Franklin Leonard committed to the promise during a panel discussion on Friday, and Tessa Thompson inaugurated the challenge during a keynote address. Regina King was the first to pledge to taking the 4% Challenge during her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, vowing to employ at least 50% women on everything she produces.
Lena Waithe, Rashida Jones, Olivia Wilde, Armie Hammer, Kumail Nanjiani, Josh Gad, Amy Pascal, Bryce Dallas Howard, Brie Larson, Eva Longoria, Rachel Brosnahan, Constance Wu, Janet Mock, Brad Simpson and Kerry Washington are among the notable producers on board.
The Sundance Film Festival recently reported that 31% of feature-length submissions this year had at least one woman director, as did 35% of episodic and shorts content. Of feature films and episodic content accepted in 2019, 41% had a woman director while 52% of shorts did.
Reese graces the cover of the new February issue of US Vogue! The magazine features a story on her as the “moral compass of Hollywood” (which is a great title for her!), and features an extensive new interview and a new photoshoot – including a photo with Betty and Ava. It’s a fantastic article exploring how Reese’s career has developed, and focuses mostly on her recent move into production and business; there are also some great quotes from Cheryl Strayed, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. I also liked reading about where her Oscar is, and that she has hardbound copies of scripts from her movies!
Read the full article below, and find high quality photos from the cover and the shoot in our Gallery. We’ll have scans for you soon. Make sure you pick up a copy when you can!
Reese Witherspoon: Activist, Advocate, Hollywood’s Moral Compass
The first time Reese Witherspoon found herself suspended from school was in third grade, when she was caught running a custom-barrette business from her desk. (She painted store-bought barrettes and sold them at a profit; when her paint pens leaked onto her desk, she was apprehended.) Another time was during her junior year, at a private girls’ high school in Nashville, when she complained to her English teacher that the work they were doing wasn’t challenging enough. Witherspoon was in many ways a model student—good grades, popular, a soccer player and cheerleader—but she also had a reputation for telling teachers what they were doing was wrong.
“I always tended to be outspoken with my opinions,” she says. “Whether they were appropriate or not.”
More than two decades later, Witherspoon is still fighting the status quo. Insofar as Hollywood is an extreme version of high school, a fishbowl of fragile egos, insecurity, and often-misdirected sexual energy, she has taken it upon herself to be a champion of the overlooked and the underestimated. She may still bear the imprint of the perky-blonde roles that kept her in American-sweetheart mode for the better part of two decades, but something’s changed beneath the surface. Witherspoon has become a formidable businesswoman, launching a company that has a hand in just about every imaginable sector of contemporary media, and she’s become a formidable activist as well, fighting for greater representation in Hollywood of people of color, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and—most of all—women.
“The idea is to put women at the center of the story,” Witherspoon says, sitting barefoot and in jeans in the kitchen of her sunny, sprawling Los Angeles home as her three dogs—a German shepherd named Nash (short for Nashville), a French bulldog named Pepper, and a lab named Hank—amble and snort among the rooms. “I was sick of making movies where I was the only female lead on the set. I was sick of seeing scripts where there was one female role, badly written, and yet every actress in town wanted the part because there was nothing else.”
There is perhaps no greater example in the history of television of putting women at the center than Big Little Lies, the HBO sensation that picked up eight Emmys in 2017. Witherspoon executive-produced the series with Nicole Kidman, with whom she also stars alongside Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, and Shailene Woodley. In the second season, which airs in late spring, Meryl Streep will bring the show’s number of female leads to six.
The Morning Show (2019) Seasons 1 & 2 available now on AppleTV+
Season 3 coming in 2023 Role: Bradley Jackson Genre: Apple TV+ Series - Drama News / Info / Photos / Official Site
Your Place Or Mine (2023) On Netflix now Role: Debbie Genre: Romantic comedy News / Info / Photos / Official Site
Legally Blonde 3 (202?) In production Role: Elle Woods Genre: Comedy News / Info / Photos / Official Site
Glamour Reese Witherspoon is an unofficial fansite dedicated to supporting and promoting the career of Reese Witherspoon. We have no contact with Ms Witherspoon or her family or management. No copyright infringement is intended through the use of content within this website ...
The Morning Show (2019)
