Reese Witherspoon has been told by studios that they are ”not interested in female-driven material”.
The ‘Big Little Lies’ star slammed Hollywood’s gender inequality, revealing she has been previously told movies featuring women’s stories are less important.
She said: ”I’ve also had studio heads say to me, ‘We don’t want to make biopics about women,’ or more simply, ‘We’re not interested in female-driven material.’
”My first go-round as a producer with ‘Gone Girl’? Every studio passed but one. When the book hit number one on the best seller lists, it was a different story.”
And Reese has also lamented about the state of racism in Hollywood and recalled a conversation she had with Mindy Kaling about the issue.
She added to the October issue of Glamour magazine: ”Another thing I think about a lot is how it feels to be a minority woman in America, so rarely seeing yourself onscreen, and it’s unconscionable. When I asked Mindy Kaling, ‘Don’t you ever get exhausted by always having to create your own roles?’ she said, ‘Reese, I’ve never had anything that I didn’t create for myself.’
”I thought, Wow, I feel like a jerk for asking that; I used to have parts that just showed up for me. I can’t imagine how hard it is to write your own parts and simultaneously have to change people’s perceptions of what a woman of colour is in today’s society.”
Meanwhile, Reese previously admitted she thinks it is hard to be a woman over 25 in the film industry.
She explained: ”It’s hard to be a female director, or a female writer, or an actress over 25. I think the dawn of streaming and the way that people are watching content now has been a great benefit because maybe women are too busy to go all the way to the theatre, but they still want to see a diverse array of women on screen. I’ve been hearing for 27 years that women don’t show up to see women in movies, and I know empirically that is not true.”
