Witherspoon faced a similar problem. ‘It wasn’t as if there was a lack of roles being offered to me. It was the dynamic aspect of playing a really interesting, complicated person that was not readily available. Honestly, I don’t know a woman who isn’t complicated. It’s strange that you don’t see many complicated women on film; complicated meaning complex, I should say.’ Cheryl Strayed’s book was the first one Witherspoon and Papandrea took on.
As it happens, Hornby had also read and loved the book and wondered about turning it into a film. When he found out Witherspoon owned the rights, he contacted her to ask if he could have a crack. The pair had met before, during the awards campaign for An Education, which Hornby had adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir. Hornby recalls that meeting with fondness: ‘It was great, because I was at a party and talking to this producer I knew. Reese was sitting near us. The producer introduced us, at which point she stood up and hugged me. Then she said something I really wasn’t expecting. She said, “You wrote ‘NippleJesus’,” which is a short story I wrote for an anthology. It made me very curious, because she had to dig that story out. You couldn’t be tipped off by an assistant. I know now she reads a lot. I think it’s an enormous source of inspiration for her. And she remembers stuff in a way that always feels incredibly flattering. I know it’s not a very inspired way of describing someone, but she just feels extremely normal and human in a way that is beyond a lot of people who have had her career trajectory.’
Once they started talking about Wild, Hornby was reassured that they had the same film in mind, one that kept the drug abuse, the promiscuity and the nudity. ‘That was why she didn’t get a studio involved until the script was done and they were ready to shoot,’ says Hornby. ‘She didn’t want anyone to come in and say, “Reese Witherspoon can’t take heroin in a movie.”’ He goes on: ‘I think it’s proof, in a way, that if you don’t want to be put in a box, then do something about it. Because [Reese] optioned the book, committed to the role, and it might mean you earn less money than you’re used to, but if what’s important is the work, then you can control your own destiny and people’s perception of you.’
Then Jean-Marc Vallée got wind of the project. The Canadian had just directed Dallas Buyers Club (starring an Oscar-winning Matthew McConaughey, one of Witherspoon’s husband’s clients) with a naturalism and lack of sentimentality that Witherspoon was keen to replicate on Wild. Vallée loved the script and signed up. By this stage, Witherspoon had some inkling of the challenges that lay ahead, but it was only during rehearsals, as Vallée outlined his approach in detail, that she began to worry. At its most harmless, this meant no make-up or mirrors on set, and Witherspoon had to lug around a full backpack rather than one stuffed with newspaper, as she’d expected. At its worst, it resulted in some graphic scenes of sex and drug-taking. ‘There were small descriptions in the script,’ admits Witherspoon, ‘but when he started describing what we were going to do, that’s when I started to panic. I was like, “Wait. What are you talking about?”’ Later, she admits: ‘I would have fired myself a couple of times during rehearsals because I was so scared, oh my God. I got my **** together, but it took me a while.’
The drug scenes were hard enough. ‘I’ve never done drugs, so I was really confused. I didn’t know what I was doing. It just required being in a really raw emotional place that didn’t feel good.’ But the sex scenes were harder. ‘That’s, like, three per cent of the movie, but it took up a tremendous amount of fear in my mind because it’s daunting.’ How did she cope? ‘I never looked ahead at the schedule. I would wake up in the morning and say, “What are we doing today?” And I’d prepare on the way to work. Sometimes I was just terrified. Like a cat on a raft... “You can’t make me do it.”’
Did she ever think about backing out? ‘I think about backing out of everything. I get to the beginning and I’m like, “I do not want to make this movie.” I’ve never had an experience where I was like, “I can’t wait to start.” I don’t know why. It’s always going to require something that doesn’t feel good, some sort of challenge or emotional gutting. It’s not a fun space to live in a lot of the time. It’s why I enjoy doing comedies. It’s much easier, thinking of what rhymes with truck.’
There were some consolations. Papandrea used to joke that between the gruelling scenes and the gruelling weather, the only way to rebound was to make a comedy. And that’s what they did next, a Texas-based road-trip comedy starring Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara, due out in May. Also, Gone Girl, Pacific Standard’s other inaugural project, had begun shooting on the same day over in Missouri. ‘Every day, it was so exciting,’ Papandrea recalls, ‘to be able to watch dailies of something that was happening across the country.’
There was also the author, who came on set for much of the filming. ‘At first I was nervous about her being there every day,’ says Witherspoon. ‘I was worried that I would do something wrong or she’d think I wasn’t performing or doing things the way she would have. But my nerves quickly dissipated and it became like I was channelling her; she was right there. It was actually helpful to ask her questions in real time.’ What did she say? ‘Every day this woman says things that touch my heart. It’s really hard to do interviews with her because she makes me cry a lot.’ Strayed is more specific. ‘I told her that the best things happen when we go outside the comfort zone. I told her I knew she could do it. I had total faith.’
Wild is, among other things, a beautiful mother-daughter love story. That’s a big part of the reason Witherspoon was drawn to it. When the film was completed, she and Laura Dern (who plays Cheryl’s mother, brilliantly) decided to watch it together with their mothers. ‘It was unequivocally one of the most important days of my life,’ Witherspoon says. ‘My mother’s mother had died when she was 50 and my mother was 20, so the movie covered a lot of similar ground. It was kind of her story, a girl trying to figure out her life after the death of her mother.’
After the screening, Witherspoon and her mother, who trained to be a paediatric nurse, went for lunch and talked in a way they never had. ‘These aren’t the kind of conversations you have at Thanksgiving, because everyone is busy.’ I ask whether they’d discussed her grandmother’s death before. ‘Not a lot. I remember being young, and my mother crying a lot. Whenever anyone brought her up, my mother would cry. We talked about what a beautiful woman she was but we never talked about what it was like for my mum at 20 to sit in a hospital room and watch her mother die. We never really had a conversation where I understood, until we started the film, which is crazy.
The day I shot the scene where Cheryl’s mother dies, I called my mum and said, “This is going to be hard, but I have to ask you some questions if that’s OK,” and she let me. I think it’s the first time she had any way of talking about that time in her life. I don’t know if anybody had ever asked her what it felt like.’ Then, after seeing the film, ‘she grabbed my hand and held it so hard. She knew that someone saw her side of it and how hard that was for her. And ultimately, that she found her way out of the wilderness of her grief and became the wonderful woman her mother always wanted her to be.’ She breaks off here. ‘If I keep talking about this I’m going to cry...’
At another point she sums the film up like this: ‘It’s one of those movies that bring up conversation. It’s a way to tell your mum that she is seen as who she is, separate from you.’
There is a scene from Walk the Line in which Witherspoon, as the country singer June Carter, wanders the aisles of a five-and-dime store in West Virginia. Out of the blue, the store manager, a woman, berates her for getting a divorce, which she calls ‘an abomination against God’. June is shaken, but polite. ‘I’m sorry I let you down, ma’am,’ she says, before edging away. The episode makes a good point: the public’s censure is rarely reasonable and a celebrity’s best recourse is often humility.
However one judges the events that took place in Atlanta in 2013, when Witherspoon’s husband was arrested for driving under the influence and she was charged with disorderly conduct for haranguing the arresting officer, it seems fair to say that in the aftermath, Witherspoon handled herself with grace. Her face clouds over when I mention it. Inevitably, I feel bad. She falls back on a series of remarks she has made before, that everyone makes mistakes, we’re all human, she never claimed to be perfect and all you can do is say sorry, learn and move on. But a week before, at the London Film Festival, she elaborated: ‘...it was a moment where I think people sort of realised I wasn’t exactly what they thought I was... We all like to define people by the ways the media presents them. If it shows I have a complexity that people didn’t know about, that’s part of human nature...’
The parallels start to draw themselves. Earlier, talking about Wild, she tells me: ‘Cheryl always says you should accept the things that happen to you; synthesise them, process them however you have to and own them because they’re part of the journey you’ve been on. Don’t be ashamed of experiences you’ve had. It’s a profound idea.’ She goes on: ‘We are so hard on ourselves. It’s part of human nature to wish you could have done better. Or have a conversation in a different way. Or handle a break-up in a different way. But there is something radical, which I got when I read Cheryl’s book for the first time, which is this: what if I forgive myself? What if we could just forgive ourselves?’ One wonders if our conception of Reese Witherspoon isn’t being changed and stretched for the better, if her choices over the past year haven’t made her, at least to us, more compelling. ‘I think [this film] will expand the way people perceive her,’ Strayed insists. ‘But the way they see her speaks more to the way we perceive young, blonde, beautiful women than it speaks to anything Reese has actually shown us. She’s played such a diversity of roles – she really hasn’t always been the all-American sweetheart – and yet somehow many decided she was that because of the way she looks, they boxed her in because she’s pretty. I always thought of her as a woman more complicated and intelligent than most give her credit for.’
Papandrea puts it another way: ‘We had to do a lot of work to convince people to get this movie made. Once they see it, they realise Reese is great. Of course she is, because she’s always been great.’
‘Wild’ is in cinemas nationwide on 16 January
This feature originally ran in the January 2015 issue of Harper's Bazaar, on newsstands 2 December 2014
