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She is already a bona fide movie star with box-office appeal -- the Legally Blonde movies have ensured that status.
She is already known for her uncanny taste in scripts and her willingness to take risks with offbeat movies -- roles in The Man In The Moon (her teenaged debut in 1991), Pleasantville, Election and American Psycho have confirmed that sense of intrigue.
She is already celebrated as a sparky southern belle and Hollywood beauty who has made herself even more appealing by becoming a glamourous wife and mother -- she and actor Ryan Phillippe celebrated their fifth anniversary on June 5 and have two children, daughter Ava Elizabeth (who will be five on Sept. 9) and infant son Deacon (one on Oct. 23).
But now this 28-year-old, Louisiana-born, Tennessee-raised, former cheerleader and one-time debutante seems poised to make another move forward. In her most substantial role to date, Witherspoon plays the complex and serious Becky Sharp in Mira Nair's lavish costume drama, Vanity Fair.
The film is based on the classic English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Poverty-stricken Becky -- half-English, half-French and all outcast in early 19th-century London society -- is one of the great heroines of English literature.
Wonderfully flawed and more modern than many leading female roles in contemporary movies, Becky is a character who epitomizes success and survival at all costs. The film, like the novel, is a serious satire of class snobbery and moral hypocrisy. It is being touted as the first major adaptation of Thackeray since Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon in 1975.
And, just to make sure that we don't mistake Vanity Fair as a one-off before she returns to blond-bombshell comedies, Witherspoon is currently filming Walk The Line for director James Mangold. She plays June Carter to Joaquin Phoenix's Johnny Cash in an ambitious biopic that promises to bring the two icons of American country music back to life on screen.
So it appears Witherspoon has the guts to go for the glory. Yet she remains outwardly modest: "I'm just a little girl from Tennessee doing the best I can," she says in a New York interview, facing the press with a million-megawatt smile while her son sleeps under supervision nearby.
The Indo-American Nair (of Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding fame) obviously believed that Witherspoon's best was yet to come. The pair met in New York two years earlier just for casual conversation and a mutual respect session. The bonding would pay off for both.
"I just love her work," Witherspoon says of Nair, "and thought she'd be a great person to work for. I'm very interested in working with female directors."
Nair then reached out to her when the Vanity Fair project matured and fell into her hands. "Mira and I were definitely very close collaborators on this film," Witherspoon says. It was Nair, Witherspoon recalls, who told studio chiefs at Focus Pictures, "She's the woman to do this highly dramatic, classic piece of literature!"
Says Witherspoon: "Her belief in me after coming off films like Legally Blonde and Legally Blonde 2 -- and her just saying that and putting me out there for the studio -- I think was a really huge vote of confidence that made me think that I could do it."
Witherspoon had done an English costume drama before. She played the whimsical role of Cecily in the 2002 version of The Importance Of Being Earnest. But that was child's play in comparison to tackling Becky and mastering her particular, low-class, wannabe-high-society accent in Vanity Fair. Especially because Witherspoon was pregnant with Deacon when filming started.
"We decided to make this movie," Witherspoon says of the decision-making process (which she shares with her husband to guarantee that they are not both working on a movie at the same time), "and then I found out I was pregnant. And I called Mira and asked if we could do this movie when I was pregnant. She said, 'Okay, when are you thinking about getting pregnant?'
"I said, 'I'm already about four weeks pregnant so we better get going!' She was a great sport about it. She thought it would really help the piece and she used it as part of the development (of the story)."
At one crucial point in the film, Nair shows Witherspoon's pregnant belly -- at a time when Becky Sharp is supposed to be pregnant, too -- during a romantic scene with James Purefoy. He plays her arrogant soldier-husband, who is about to go into battle for the British at Napoleon Bonaparte's Waterloo. The scene is sexy, yet tasteful, says Witherspoon.
"The great thing about working with Mira Nair and the reason I was so attracted to her work is that she has this way of putting sexuality in her films in a way so that it's not gratuitous and it's not overt. It's a very female sensuality. It's very hard for me to describe but it has a lot to do with colour and mood and lighting. I felt very comfortable with her. So, when she said, 'I really want to make sure we made the most of your body and show your pregnant belly,' I just didn't feel nervous at all.
"(Well), on the day, I felt a little bit nervous, but I knew she would do it in a beautiful way and I was really happy when I saw the film that it came out and it's so beautiful. It's real. It's what really happened and I think it adds to the vulnerability of the character -- if the character has any vulnerability. (Seeing her pregnant gives the audience) that sense that there's something real happening in this woman's life. She may never see her husband again and she might have a child. It added a lot of dimension."
In another scene, Becky flaunts her sexuality in a risque dance performance in front of the English King. To stage the sequence, Nair calls on her Indian heritage (Thackeray was also born in India, but of English parents) by exploiting the English fascination with Indian culture. She turned the dance into a Bollywood extravaganza.
"Some of the stuff is really hard to do but it was so fun," Witherspoon recalls. "We had a really great time doing the dance ritual. It was wonderful."
Thanks to the skin-baring costumes, the sequence had to be shot early in the schedule "so that my pregnancy wouldn't show so much," Witherspoon says. "Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, who was the costume designer, had the job of a lifetime ... to mask a pregnancy and then show the pregnancy and then mask it again."
Witherspoon shot one brief part of the epic-length film after her son Deacon was born -- the coda at the end of the story. It was filmed on location in India, unlike the earlier set-in-India but shot-in-England scenes. The experience left her in awe of Nair as she watched the director flourish in her homeland.
"We'd been given this tiny budget to do a re-shoot ... to make the ending have more scope and be more beautiful and romantic. And, in two days, she managed to get 500 extras speaking three different languages, (plus) four elephants, six camels, 15 actors and a crew of 200 men, to completely listen to her. She got everything she wanted out of it and more. That day, for me, was an amazing experience and an awakening to what an amazing director she is."
Making Vanity Fair also served as an insight into Witherspoon's own power to do her work out of context -- she was the only American in a major role in the piece. What might have been intimidating turned into an advantage.
"Yeah, I definitely think that," she says. "I think that being an outsider and being the only American helped inform those things for me. Coming to a piece of literature like this that's so revered and steeped in history, people know it and know the characters. It was nice being able to come to it with a fresh perspective and having (as the director) somebody like Mira, who also feels like an outsider of that culture. We were sort of collaborators in that way: 'How are we going to turn this on it's ear?'
"I think it gives you an opportunity to feel more free within the character -- and I think that is how Thackeray would have wanted it. I think people put their ideas out there and they want them to be interpreted and brought to a modern audience."
'I'm a Slob Like You!'
Reese Witherspoon claims that sleazy tabloid rumours that her five-year marriage with Ryan Phillippe is troubled are just that -- rumours.
"I really don't care," she says in a New York interview. "People are going to talk about you whether you're the butcher at the grocery store or a movie star. It just doesn't matter to me.
"When you know what's real, it doesn't matter. We laugh. It's pretty funny. And it's amazing some of the things people can make up in their minds.
"I'm still befuddled by the interest. I can't believe anyone is that interested, particularly of the pictures of me at the grocery store or the preschool. I mean, every day I'm wearing the same sweatsuit. Who is interested in that?
"But, hey, if people look at the photos and say, 'Well, she's a slob like me!' I'm all for it. Because I am -- I am a slob like you!"
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SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
- Walk The Line (2004)
- Vanity Fair (2004)
- Legally Blonde 2 (2003)
- Sweet Home Alabama (2002)
- The Importance Of Being Earnest (2002)
- Legally Blonde (2001)
- Little Nicky (2000)
- American Psycho (2000)
- Election (1999)
- Cruel Intentions (1999)
- Pleasantville (1998)
- Fear (1996)