Through her production company Hello Sunshine, Witherspoon offers complex portrayals of women.
By Paige Ganim
“I’ll show you how valuable Elle Woods can be,” Reese Witherspoon said in her iconic role in “Legally Blonde.” In hindsight, these words were an omen to Witherspoon’s quest one day to prove the value of all kinds of women.
If “Legally Blonde” was one of the first stepping stones toward multi-dimensional female character portrayals in film, Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, is the contemporary cornerstone of female empowerment in the media. It caught lightning in a bottle by adapting bestselling female-written novels, allowing their nuanced portrayals of modern women to reach a wider audience.
The production company aims to “shine a light on where women are now and help them chart a new path forward,” according to its website.
The 2017 #MeToo movement and the lack of strong acting parts for women prompted Witherspoon to start Hello Sunshine.
“I have to leave this business a better place than the way I found it because I don’t want the next young Reese to have to go through what I went through,” Witherspoon said on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things. “I want her to feel safe.”
Witherspoon did help transform Hollywood into a more suitable place for women.
In March 2022, Hello Sunshine adapted Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel “Daisy Jones and the Six” into a limited series on Amazon Prime, which instantly became a hit.
Inspired by the band Fleetwood Mac, the series follows a rising 1970s rock band as they navigate success, heartbreak and love.
One could attribute the series’ popularity to the actors’ conventional attractiveness, the catchy original tunes or people’s love for the 70s aesthetic. However, the show’s writing and adaptation for the female gaze distinguished the show from many others.
Riley Keough plays Daisy Jones, a singer who discovers her voice and agency in a male-dominated industry and fervently paves a brighter path forward for herself.
The three other female main characters each have their respective journeys. One woman wrestles with embracing her queerness in a homophobic industry. Another struggles to defy patriarchal norms that push women to have kids. A third works to find strength and self-assuredness within motherhood and a rocky relationship.
By placing multi-faceted women at the vanguard, the show transforms into an expansive narration of women — one that details different female-centered experiences with love, dreams and self-identity.
On the other hand, Witherspoon’s company stands out for its repeated effort to tell stories concentrated around middle-aged women — a feat that few in Hollywood attempt.
“Nobody is sitting around thinking, what can I shoot in L.A. that’s going to have a 50-year-old woman in it?” Garner told the Hollywood Reporter. “All women in this town owe a debt of gratitude to Reese.”
In April, Hello Sunshine adapted “The Last Thing He Told Me,” a novel about a newly-married woman named Hannah who embarks on a mission to uncover what happened to her husband, who abruptly vanished from her and his teenage daughter’s life with no explanation.
On the surface, the story is a confounding mystery, but underneath, it underscores the complexities of motherhood.
Hannah, played by Jennifer Garner, highlights the delicate balance between mothers’ fierce protectiveness over their children and their inherent vulnerability as humans.
The show is a reprieve from the stereotypical stories about a “scorned wife or a wife that’s trying to understand her situation in response to her husband,” Laura Dave, the book’s author and the show’s producer, told the Hollywood Reporter.
The series’ attention to detail on the notion of motherhood and the adversities that older women often face might stem from its all-female-directing team.
“This is just a story about a woman learning to trust her own instinct, a woman finding her own agency and struggling through to prove herself to herself,” Garner told the Hollywood Reporter. “And nobody can tell that story better than women in Hollywood.”
Additionally, Witherspoon recently adapted Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 essay collection, “Tiny Beautiful Things,” into a series.
Kathryn Hahn plays Clare, a mother who is pushing 50 and on the brink of a divorce.
Clare copes with latent bitterness due to her unaccomplished dreams and unprocessed grief over the sudden death of her mother. She also ineptly tries to mend her relationship with her daughter, who is navigating her own queer journey. Clare’s healing takes place over the course of the show as she writes for an advice column under the pseudonym “Sugar.”
The show grapples with society’s idea of the perfect, unblemished woman and mother. It tugs at your heartstrings as it pans between middle-aged Clare and her early 20s self as she asks herself, “How did I get so far from the person I wanted to be?”
Hello Sunshine is Witherspoon’s golden ticket “to control [her] own material [and] to give thoughtful filmmakers and female writers an opportunity to tell their story in their own words,” Witherspoon said on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast. “You can’t take that from me. Just because your system doesn’t allow it, I’ll make it happen.”