TORONTO—For the record, Reese Witherspoon was all glammed up when she took the stage to talk about her glamour-free “Wild” and “The Good Lie,” among other things, at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday.
Ms. Witherspoon appeared with glorious blonde hair and cheekbones back in order. Her scraggly, feral look in “Wild” was gone. The lesson, from a film marketing standpoint, is clear: You’d better look really good to sell yourself looking bad.
In truth, Topic A at the Glenn Gould Studio, where Ms. Witherspoon was interviewed for the festival’s Mavericks program by the film scholar Ruby Rich, was not Ms. Witherspoon’s acting career, but rather her sharp turn toward producing, through her own company, Pacific Standard.
“We’ll come to being an actor, don’t worry,” said Ms. Rich, as she bored in on her first question: Why was Ms. Witherspoon so intent on being her own boss?
It all started four years ago, Ms. Witherspoon said: “I suddenly started to realize that scripts were not that great, particularly for women.”
If she didn’t start ginning up better female roles, “who’s going to do it?” Ms. Witherspoon recalled asking herself.
Now 38, she is not the first actress to take hold of her own career by producing. Drew Barrymore did it. Angelina Jolie is doing it. Penny Marshall, a triple threat who began as an actress and soon became a director and producer, blazed the trail almost 30 years ago, when she got behind the camera on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
But few actor-producers, male or female, have brought Ms. Witherspoon’s Type A intensity to the enterprise. Her company’s first two films, “Wild,” directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, and “Gone Girl,” directed by David Fincher, are stirring credible Oscar talk as the season gets under way. A third Pacific Standard film, “Don’t Mess With Texas,” is coming next year from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros. A film about Peggy Lee, on which Nora Ephron was working when she died, is also on the runway, Ms. Witherspoon said Sunday.
And, with all that, said Ms. Witherspoon, she is not foreclosing the idea of finishing her interrupted academic career at Stanford University.
“I would love to go back,” she said. “I told my 15-year-old daughter, I’ll go to college with you.”
She has not aged a day and looks as cute as ever!
