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 On March 26, Reese Witherspoon was married to talent manager Jim Toth in a simple, elegant affair at her ranch in Ojai, California. Vogue’s Jonathan Van Meter spoke to the actress a few months before her wedding and discovered that, although the actress learned to ride an elephant for her role in the film, that’s nothing compared to balancing fame, love, and family. 
 
 Here she comes, waving like Miss America but looking like a blonde Audrey Hepburn. She is dressed in all black—leggings, cardigan, Wayfarers, and a kitten heel. The wave is hilariously exuberant, and even from a block away, as she strides purposefully toward me, I can see that the smile is comic: forced and way too big. And with that one winning gesture—a perfectly timed little burst of goofball—Reese Witherspoon signals that she is not only painfully aware that the sidewalk has suddenly become a runway lined with paparazzi yelling her name on an otherwise quiet Thursday afternoon in Santa Monica, but also that she is OK with it. Look at my weird life! she shouts without saying a word. 
 
 It’s a beautiful sunny day in early February, and we are meeting at the Blue Plate Oysterette, a hip little seafood joint not far from the Santa Monica Pier. Witherspoon, still at the curb, stares at the outside tables for a moment and then looks back at the photographers in the street still snapping away. She glances at the hostess, then at me, and finally says, with an ironic exclamation point, “How about inside!” 
 
 See a slideshow of Reese Witherspoon throughout the years in Vogue. 
 
 One of the things about being a polite Southern girl saddled with a cumbersome fame is that you are in constant negotiation with your surroundings. You know, more often than not, that your presence will tilt the delicate balance of the workaday world in your direction. And one thing that every good Southern girl knows is: Don’t make a scene. But that is exactly what happens everywhere Witherspoon goes. Indeed, just moments ago, people on this oceanside block were going about their noonday business: lunch, errands, sightseeing. And then—bam!—chaos. 
 
 As we take our seats, she shakes her head in weary bemusement and says, “Every dog has her fleas.” (Witherspoon’s essential Southernness frequently comes through in her language.) She takes a deep breath. “I wasn’t planning on drinking,” she says, “but now I am.” 
 
 Is that commotion an everyday occurrence? I ask. 
 
 “Lately,” she says. 
 
 All the wedding talk? (In case you haven’t heard, Witherspoon is engaged.) 
 
 “Yeah,” she says. “It usually heats up during, like, pregnancies or babies or marriage. It’s the drama of real life. . . . It’s interesting to people. Readers want to know! I was talking to an actress the other day who is pregnant right now, and she was like, ‘What is it? What’s the deal?’ She said, ‘Oh, maybe once I have the baby no one will pay any attention,’ and I was like, ‘Bwah-ha-ha-ha!!!!’ ” She exaggeratedly tosses her head back. “ ‘Oh, yeah. They will leave you alone after you have the baby. Suuure. That’s exactly how it works.’ ” 
 
 See a slideshow of brides who wore unconventional wedding dresses here. 
 
 But then, perhaps not wanting to sound ungracious, she puts a different spin on it. “I get hugged a lot,” she says. “Which is fun. Mostly it’s all good, positive energy that comes to me. I like people. And at the end of the day, we’re all just people, you know? We’re all just going through it. Nobody’s life experience is all that much different than anyone else’s. We’ve all had our share of heartbreak. It’s the universal language of life.” 
 
 I can’t help looking down at the four-carat rock sitting high on her hand, a ring proffered a few months earlier by the handsome 40-year-old CAA agent Jim Toth, whom she’s been dating for a little over a year. What’s he like? I ask. “He’s wonderful,” she says, beaming. “He’s just a really great guy, and I feel really lucky. It’s so cute: Over the holidays I was at a department store in L.A. with my friends, and these three women from Oklahoma came up to me, and they said”—she lays on a thick Southern drawl—“ ‘Reese. We are so happy for yeeew. We liiike this guy for yeeew.’ And I said, ‘You do?!’ ‘Yes, ma’am. We think he is a niiice man. We think he is going to treat you well and be good to yeeew.’ I was like, ‘Really?’ So sweet! And I told them my mother likes him very much, too.” 
 
 I had been hearing from people who work with Witherspoon that she is in, as they say, “a good place.” When I mention these reports, she looks at me with one of those faces she is famous for, a look that telegraphs surprise tinged with irritation. “I mean . . . it sort of indicates that at other times I was not in a good place.” She laughs. “Which is true. I have had my share of heartbreak. But I think your friends really know when you are at your happiest. Even though I am nervous and excited and all those things people feel when they are about to get married, I think I am mostly very calm right now. Usually, I’m a little bit of a squirrel. I have a squirrelly energy.” 
 
 Squirrelly? 
 
 “Yeah,” she says. “Like, you don’t know where your next nut is gonna come from?” She stares at me with those unblinking blue eyes. “At the moment I am not buzzing around all squirrelly and nervous. I just feel really lucky to be with someone who cares so much and is so kind and loving. You know? It’s a really nice thing to finally have that.” 
 
 Click here for a slideshow of Reese Witherspoon's best red carpet moments. 
 
 
 
 Witherspoon may be settling down in her personal life, but she’s taking more risks than ever in the roles she chooses. Despite having recently said, “There’s not a part for a 34-year-old woman in a robot movie” (implying she would never want or be able to carry an action flick), she will later this year star in This Means War, one of those new era–Hollywood hybrids (action-adventure/romantic comedy, anyone?). The director, McG, describes it as both “my answer to Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Ocean’s Eleven” and “my ode to Billy Wilder.” Witherspoon plays a busy working girl who is unlucky in love but suddenly finds herself with a glamorous problem: Two spies—one American, one British (played by new era–Hollywood hotties Chris Pine and Tom Hardy)—start using every weapon in their arsenals to woo her. 
 
 “It was new for her to be suspended in a rig hanging upside down in a Jeep from a building,” says McG. “But it’s just mind-scrambling to work with her in terms of her comedic timing, her sense of what matters, her inherent ability to be lit from within.” McG also hopes to show audiences a different side of her. “I think you are going to see a sexy Reese Witherspoon the likes of which you have never seen. That was a challenge that I set out for her at the beginning of the process. I said, ‘Men like you, but men don’t covet you the way that I think they can.’ ” 
 
 It’s anybody’s guess whether this film will be watchable or whether Witherspoon will work in it or not. It wasn’t that long ago when it seemed Witherspoon could do no wrong. As the nineties came to an end, she began delivering in one smart comedy after another: Cruel Intentions, Election, and the two Legally Blonde films, the Elle Woods franchise that put her newly formed production company, Type A Films, on the map and also gave her some real power in Hollywood. By the time she won the Oscar for Best Actress in Walk the Line, in 2005, she had taken on an air of invincibility. Was there anything this girl couldn’t do? Turns out the answer is yes. She has lately been miscast a few times, most egregiously as a pro softball player past her prime in James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know. (As one big Hollywood producer said to me, “What woman identifies with a person who has no interest in falling in love? Who is that supposed to be?”) 
 
 It’s far less of a stretch to imagine Witherspoon as the scrappy ingenue who will do whatever it takes to survive in the Depression-era circus world of her latest film, Water for Elephants, based on the best-selling novel and directed by Francis Lawrence. That role is the reason, a couple of days before our lunch, I find myself inside a giant circus tent pitched in a dusty lot near the train tracks in Riverside, California. Witherspoon appears in front of me and asks, “Wanna see something?” She leads me over to one of her costars, Tai, the 42-year-old elephant she spent six months with last summer, and coos, “Hiiii, laaaady,” and then runs a hand down her trunk. “I love that her trunk is both her nose and her hand,” says Witherspoon as the 9,000-pound creature begins sniffing around to see what sort of treat is in the offing. “She has this incredible dexterity; she can pick up a log, but she can also pick up something this tiny.” Witherspoon holds up one blue peanut M&M and then flattens out her palm, and Tai gently plucks it from her hand and puts it in her mouth. 
 
 Set in the early thirties, the story follows a young Ivy League veterinary student played by Robert Pattinson, who, left with nothing after his parents die in a car accident, joins the circus, where he falls in love with Witherspoon’s character, Marlena. Marlena is not only the star of the circus, whose act with four horses and then an elephant is the show’s big attraction; she is also married to the charismatic, controlling ringmaster, played with sinister menace by Christoph Waltz. 
 
 Witherspoon has made more than a few films where she has had to train for months to learn an entirely new skill set before a single frame was shot: most famously learning to sing like June Carter Cash in Walk the Line. Now the circus. “About three months before the movie started, I went to circus school,” she says, “doing trapeze and acrobatics with Cirque du Soleil performers. A lot of it is flexibility and learning to bend your body backward. I had been a gymnast when I was little, so getting that flexibility back was really fun.” Then she went to a ranch to train with Tai; she was slightly nervous the first day. “She could crush you with her jaw, but she knows the exact right amount of pressure with which to pick you up but not hurt you. It’s really incredible. I trust her more than any other animal I have ever been around.” 
 
 Interestingly, the elephant in the room turned out to be the least of anyone’s troubles. (As Pattinson puts it, “She was the most consistently professional creature I have ever worked with.”) It was the horses—two white Andalusians and two black Friesians—that turned out to be high-strung and unpredictable. “Reese grew up around horses,” says Lawrence, “and she owns a couple that she rides now, and even she was scared of them.” Says Witherspoon: “I’ve always been a little bit of a tomboy that way, so I just always enjoy the thrill of doing something dangerous.” 
 
 She got more than she wished for. Not only did she get thrown from a horse one day, Pattinson tells a story about shooting a scene in which one of the horses is lying down in a train car with Witherspoon curled up on the ground next to it when suddenly the horse jumped to its feet and stepped on her leg. “I could see in Reese’s face that it must have hurt more than anything, and she played it off like it was absolutely nothing,” says Pattinson. “And then the next day she had this enormous bruise. It could have quite easily broken her leg, but she didn’t mention it to anybody. She is just incredibly brave that way.” 
 
 Witherspoon’s toughness was one of the main reasons Lawrence cast her in the film. “What I liked is that there’s that determination, but there’s also a sense of humor and a sense of vulnerability. It must come from her family and upbringing. You sort of feel like if she sets her mind to something, it’s going to happen—nothing is going to get in her way. And that’s part of what keeps her interesting—and oddly a little dangerous.” 
 
 Pattinson, too, thinks there’s more to Witherspoon than meets the eye. “In terms of public perception, she’s thought of as America’s Sweetheart. And she kind of is in a lot of ways. But I think that she’s a lot bawdier than that, a lot more raucous. It did actually shock me to see that. She’s tough. You wouldn’t want to get into an argument with her at all.” He laughs. 
 
 “You can always tell that she will be incredibly nice to anyone who’s not an idiot, but it’s always very clear that there’s a line you really shouldn’t cross.” (When I tell Witherspoon that Pattinson said this, her response is classic Reese: “Oh, yeah. I’m a little junkyard dog.”) 
 
 If only she had brought some of that edgy danger to her performance. Although her scenes in the ring with the horses and the elephant are breathtaking, not least of all because you know that she is doing all of the stunts herself, and she looks fantastic in 1930s cut-on-the-bias evening gowns (and even committed to dyeing her hair platinum for the movie), it unfortunately feels like she’s holding back in some way. Perhaps it was hard to compete with the director’s overheated take on an already melodramatic story, in which terrible things happen to everyone, animals and humans alike. A feel-good movie this is not. 
 
 But whatever the critical response will be, Witherspoon seems grateful for the experience: “I spent six months of my life last year with an elephant. Every day! Are you kidding me? And in leotards with sparkles all over them. I mean, come on! That’s like a little girl’s fantasy.” 
 
 
 
 Two weeks after our lunch in Santa Monica, the day after the Oscars, Witherspoon calls me on the phone. She has just picked up her kids—Ava, eleven, and Deacon, seven—from some after-school activity, and she sounds a bit harried. 
 
 “What is that?” she says to her dog, annoyed. “Don’t eat that.” 
 
 Now that the Oscars are over, she has a couple months off—or “in town,” as she puts it. “You know, it can be a crazy life. Sometimes you feel like you are on a speeding train and you just don’t know where it’s going. You can start to lose your identity and what it is that you are really working for.” Like a lot of working women, she’s constantly looking for the right balance. “I don’t wake up to make movies. I wake up to have a wonderful family and to cultivate the best life for all of us, and it’s great to now have a partner in that. We have a lot of family meetings. ‘Mom’s going to be away and coming home on the weekends. How does everybody feel about that?’ It’s always military operations around here. Lots of different moving parts. I have my moments when I feel like I’m just going to collapse and I can’t do it anymore and I’m failing at everything. Like, you’re kind of good at a bunch of stuff but not really good at anything.” 
 
 Witherspoon, who turned 35 in March, seems acutely aware that she is on the cusp of an entirely new stage in her life. “I am really going through that right now. I’ve had some really kind of sad moments lately. You don’t go backward! And I think 35 for a woman is a big thing. I remember when I was a little girl looking up at my mother at 35 doing her hair in the mirror, and I thought, my mother has never been more beautiful. She had years of wisdom you can’t erase. And now I feel the same way when I look in the mirror. You can’t pretend you are an ingenue. You can’t pretend you are wide-eyed and innocent. It’s on your face! It’s in your body. It’s in your voice. It’s in your reactions to things when people say, ‘I just did the most morally corrupt thing I’ve done in my life’ and you literally don’t blink.” She laughs. “You’ve either done it yourself or you know someone who has.” 
 
 Having a preteen daughter has also made her see herself in a new light. “There’s a shift in your womanhood. That’s the little girl, and I am the woman. There’s a big difference. She’s on the precipice of having her love affairs and her life.” 
 
 I ask her what Ava is like. “She is curious and artistic and very smart,” she says. “She really surprises me. I know it’s corny, but being a parent to me is such a great privilege; that I get to chaperone these beautiful little souls through life. They astound me with their knowledge and their humor. Parenthood is not at all what I expected it to be. I thought you make little people in your image. But they are just nothing like me or their father [her ex-husband, Ryan Phillippe]. They are their own individuals.” 
 
 Because I first met Witherspoon eight years ago, when I interviewed her for this magazine, I ask her, What does 34 know that 26 didn’t? “I definitely know now that I know nothing,” she says. “When I was 26 I would have told you a lot of things that I thought I knew really, really well,” she says. “I was a little more shut down in my 20s. I was really scared of a lot of things and a lot of people. I have gone through so many changes since then. Obviously, being divorced and having a couple of relationships. I’m much more open than I was. I think with life experience you go: I have no idea what’s next. The unexpected doesn’t surprise me anymore. It really shocked me then.” 
 
 Would you say you were blindsided by things? 
 
 “Yeah,” she says. “Really blindsided. I was always shocked about finding out things or behavior or people’s attitudes toward things. You just realize that you don’t know anything about love or relationships.” 
 
 It is different interviewing Witherspoon now. For one thing, we are comfortably hanging out for a couple of hours in a restaurant shooting the breeze and drinking wine; eight years ago we sat in facing chairs with a coffee table between us at her production-company office, and she was all business—I felt as if I were in a job interview. Today she is sweet, relaxed, and full of thoughtful questions; but she is also a very sharp and funny lunch companion, and some of her retorts have real teeth. For example, if you don’t talk as rat-a-tat fast as she does, she has a habit of finishing your sentences for you, but with her own particular take on things. At one point we were talking about fashion, and I said, “People who love fashion often . . .” 
 
 “ . . . Lack perspective?” she said with a comically judgmental look on her face. 
 
 But one thing that hasn’t changed is that she is as private as ever. Indeed, she seems almost constitutionally unsuited for the level of fame she has to live with. At one point, I ask her what is the worst thing about being Reese Witherspoon, and she pauses for a very long time. Finally she says, “I mean, I feel like an ingrate for even thinking anything isn’t good. I’m very, very, very lucky. But . . . umm . . . probably that I parted with my privacy a long time ago. We went different ways. And sometimes I mourn it. Sometimes I will sit in the car and cry. Because I can’t get out. That’s the only thing: I mourn the loss of my privacy.” 
 
 More than most people in her position during this era of constant self-revelation, Witherspoon has nonetheless managed to maintain a modicum of privacy. “I have to say, I have been through a few life experiences that have just made me feel really good about my friends because the truth never came out about certain things. And that made me feel like I have confidantes in them. I mean, look: I don’t have that many friends. I have a few really amazing friends whom I consider family. But it means a lot to me that I have that, because so much of my life belongs to other people. Everyone always laughs about it and goes, ‘Boy, they got that wrong!’ It makes me feel like, Wow, maybe there’s something that’s still my own.” 
 
 This is one of the strange conundrums of being Reese, the polite Southern girl with the cumbersome fame. She did not know she was parting with her privacy until the train had already left the station. “I just think you never think you are ever going to get to any level where it’s going to happen to you. I mean, that would be extreme hubris.” 
 
 Do you ever regret becoming an actor? 
 
 “Noooo!” she says, as if I had just asked her if she wishes she had married her high school sweetheart and stayed in Nashville. “With whatever I’ve lost, I’ve gained tenfold in life experience. I have an interesting life.” 
 
 
 
 At our lunch a few weeks earlier, Witherspoon mentions that she and Nora Ephron are developing a film together about the singer Peggy Lee. (This explains why Witherspoon was humming standards under her breath to Tai at the photo shoot.) Lee, who grew up in North Dakota and who’s best known for her inimitable cover of the Little Willie John hit “Fever,” was one of the most influential jazz vocalists of all time, with a career that lasted six decades (she died in 2002). Ephron is writing and directing; Witherspoon will star. When I ask her how she feels about making another biopic about another American singer-songwriter from the heartland, she says, “When Nora and I began talking about Peggy Lee, it was really exciting because Nora has this unbridled enthusiasm for that era and that music. She knows every lyric to every song. So yeah, I am excited to revisit that.” Has she herself ever considered singing as a career? “I am not going to cut an album,” she says. “I’m not going to suddenly have a pop record on the charts.” She laughs. “But if I was going to do it, it would be country, because I like country music a lot.” 
 
 I tell her that Ephron once sat me down when I was going through a difficult time and gave me some very frank advice that I have been following ever since. “I had a moment like that with Nora, too,” she says. “She really helped me through a hard time. It was like having the best girlfriend ever. She makes you laugh and she makes you think. I feel very lucky for her friendship.” 
 
 When I call Ephron to talk about Witherspoon she says, “She’s a really smart, really charming, dear, dear person. Everyone loves her. And lovely on the set, and she basically kills herself. I mean, you know, she took softball lessons for a year!” She laughs. “And she went through that divorce in a kind of . . . you would call it a textbook way, if anyone had written a textbook about how to do it. I have never seen anybody handle a breakup as brilliantly as she did. She didn’t pretend to the people who knew her that it was anything but difficult and painful, but she was completely private. She made herself the winner of a situation that had been very difficult without suddenly appearing with a completely new look or dating someone wildly inappropriate in order to prove that she was fine. She lived her life in some dignified way, and it worked! I am just an enormous admirer of the way she handled that experience.” 
 
 What made you think of her for Peggy Lee? “Just for fun, just to make myself feel really bad, I watched Walk the Line again, and it’s such an amazing movie. And she is so brilliant in it. She just disappeared inside that character without losing her Reese-iness, which we love. But she is June Carter Cash forevermore. It’s an astonishing performance. So that’s one of the things that I’m excited about; she is going to do the same thing with Peggy Lee. What I really believe about her is that her great gift is for character acting. She can really transform herself. That performance in Election is just spectacular.” 
 
 
 
 Tracy Flick, the character from Election who will stop at nothing to win, is one of the great gifts of modern cinema. Indeed, it is now a noun, a type of person, like saying “She is an Eve Harrington.” When I ask Witherspoon about it, she says, “I think what’s flattering about it is that I created a character that never existed within the Zeitgeist before. She became a point of reference to people that seems very individual and very singular. It’s like one of those characters, like Chauncy Gardiner, whom you don’t know how to describe any other way. They are just very . . . Tracy Flick! I don’t think people think I am Tracy Flick. Not at all.” 
 
 Hmm. Not so fast. Tracy Flick is nothing if not a determined little junkyard dog, a squirrelly Type A trying to figure out where her next nut is going to come from. As our phone call winds down, I ask Witherspoon about her own politics. “Well, I don’t really get into that stuff,” she says. “Everybody has their own choice, their political opinions. I don’t think it’s my place when talking to Vogue about movies that I’m making to use that opportunity to promote my political ideas. Not my cup of tea. It’s sort of private. I was raised Southern, you know? It wasn’t like you were told to talk about religion and politics at a dinner party. And don’t get me wrong: I definitely have a lot of opinions. I am not opinion-free. But there’s a time and a place for everything. But maybe I will change my mind! Look, if I wanted to run for office, I would. If I want to espouse my political opinions, I will run for office.” She laughs. “And that’s a possibility!” ||||| Reese Witherspoon: Pretty in Pink on Wedding Day 
 
 Email This Reese Witherspoon's fairy tale 
 
 
 
 The nuptials, which took place on March 26 at Libby Ranch, Witherspoon's Ojai, Calif., estate, were a 
 
 
 
 "There was so much joy in the room and a lot of laughter. ... There was a real family feel," says a guest. 
 
 
 
 Witherspoon was every bit the blushing bride in a rose-hued dress fit for a princess. The bride's Monique Lhuillier gown came featured a tulle skirt, Chantilly lace bodice and rows of silk flowers descending along a satin silk ribbon. 
 
 
 
 "She took your breath away," a guest tells Reese Witherspoon's fairy tale wedding to agent Jim Toth was fit for Hollywood royalty, from the picturesque setting to the bride's dream dress.The nuptials, which took place on March 26 at Libby Ranch, Witherspoon's Ojai, Calif., estate, were a modest affair that included friends, family and Witherspoon's two children, Ava and Deacon, from her previous marriage to Ryan Phillippe "There was so much joy in the room and a lot of laughter. ... There was a real family feel," says a guest.Witherspoon was every bit the blushing bride in a rose-hued dress fit for a princess. The bride's Monique Lhuillier gown came featured a tulle skirt, Chantilly lace bodice and rows of silk flowers descending along a satin silk ribbon."She took your breath away," a guest tells PEOPLE 
 
 Witherspoon's daughter, who also served as her maid of honor, wore a matching custom-designed Lhuiller dress.After the ceremony, Witherspoon traded in her gown for a white silk Lhuiller minidress, which she wore for the remainder of the evening.The actress's most recent nuptials were a far cry from her 1999 wedding to Phillippe. The couple married in 1999 at the Charleston, S.C., Old Wide Awake Plantation in a field of wildflowers. The bride, who was seven months pregnant with daughter Ava at the time, wore a dress designed by Judianna Makovsky , who created the retro looks for 1998's 'Pleasantville.' ||||| When Reese Witherspoon was 17, she had already appeared in four films. Still, she took an unlikely part-time job, as an intern in Disney’s post-production department. “I wanted to learn about editing, visual correction, and sound mixing,” she tells me 25 years later. Not long after, she worked as a production assistant on the 1995 Denzel Washington film Devil in a Blue Dress, helping with casting, among other things. Also: “I parked Denzel’s Porsche!” 
 
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 That inquisitiveness, as well as nearly three decades in front of the camera, has made Witherspoon one of Hollywood’s most astute producers. She turned Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl into a $369 million worldwide hit in 2014 (that earned Rosamund Pike an Oscar nomination) and did it again, that same year, transforming Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Wild, into a breakout success ($52 million plus Oscar nods for Witherspoon and costar Laura Dern). Then came HBO’s Big Little Lies, executive produced with costar Nicole Kidman; the cultural bellwether about female relationships and domestic abuse, based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, swept nearly every category for which it was nominated at the 2017 Emmys. After years of hearing from studio executives that there was no market for female-driven films, Witherspoon had succeeded to a degree that proved a hunger was there. Related: See The 100 Most Creative People In Business 2018 Her instinct for what women want is now being tested on multiple platforms through her 18-month-old storytelling company, Hello Sunshine. She and her team currently have shows in development at Hulu, NBC, and Apple TV (which has partnered on three projects, one rumored to be the biggest deal in history for a straight-to-series show), as well as a film at TriStar/Sony Pictures. But Witherspoon is also laying the foundation for a direct-to-consumer brand, one that is already beginning to speak to women through a website, social media, YouTube and Facebook videos, audiobooks, podcasts, and newsletters—whichever platform she and Hello Sunshine execs think best honors the story being told. For all the company’s digital ambition, Hello Sunshine’s Santa Monica, California, headquarters have an old-fashioned feel. The loft-like interior, with exposed wooden beams and pipes, is cheerfully decorated by Crate & Barrel (Witherspoon collaborates with the retailer). Vintage typewriters and hundreds of books make plain the company’s abiding passions: stories and the people who tell them. Sheets of paper with typewritten words to live by, tacked to a wall, gently rustle every time the front door opens. “I hope that you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there,” reads one, a line from Nora Ephron’s 1996 commencement address at Wellesley College. “And I also hope you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.” Fluorescent signs at the back of the room illuminate a five-word ethos: optimism, humor, curiosity, honesty, generosity. The space—which doubles as a set for interviews—is recognizable from videos on the Hello Sunshine website. Witherspoon’s glassed-in office is within shouting distance of her coworkers, who on a late March day sit or stand at a handful of desks or read books in armchairs. Witherspoon is wearing a navy blazer and a blue shirt with white hearts, both from Draper James, the apparel and housewares brand she launched online in 2015 as a “hey y’all!” celebration of her down-home roots. Her look is feminine, but not precious. Or, as her friend Kerry Washington describes it, “genteel Southern badass.” Witherspoon, in person, bears a distracting similitude to Elle Woods, the character she made famous with 2001’s Legally Blonde. Celeste Ng, whose novel Little Fires Everywhere is being adapted by Hello Sunshine for Hulu, had a similar first reaction: “She’s bubbly and perky and scarily smart. I thought, Oh my god, it’s Elle Woods! But there’s a kinship with [Election‘s] Tracy Flick, too, in that people who underestimate her learn their mistake really fast.” 
 
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 Wherever Witherspoon goes—Asia, Europe, Africa, South America—she is stopped by Legally Blonde fans: “I went to law school because of you,” they’ll say, or, “You helped me believe in myself.” She gets teary talking about the film’s impact. “I didn’t even understand when I was making it that it was a bit of a modern feminist manifesto,” she says. “Seeing a woman who is interested in feminine attitudes—getting her nails done—but who is also interested in promoting herself and accomplishing things was a new idea of feminine. A lot of women related to that, and the feeling of being underestimated.” Related video: Our all-female crew talks women in Hollywood with Reese Witherspoon Cynics might wonder if Witherspoon’s production company was merely designed to capitalize on #MeToo’s momentum. But Hello Sunshine was founded in November 2016, nearly a year before the flood of 60-plus allegations against veteran Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein exposed just how endemic and toxic the industry’s gender imbalance has been. The outpouring of firsthand accounts of sexual abuse from fellow actors encouraged Witherspoon to reveal her own multiple experiences of harassment and assault, including by a director when she was just 16. She was among the Hollywood women who organized the all-black dress code for the Golden Globes this past January as part of the Time’s Up movement. This look is totally Madeline Mackenzie! @reesewitherspoon is in Monterey and brought along the Draper James Elliston Floral Skirt — link in bio to shop ???? A post shared by Draper James (@draperjames) on Apr 14, 2018 at 11:09am PDT “Part of me is incredulous,” says Witherspoon of Hollywood’s quick pivot to addressing gender disparity. “I can’t believe people are actually listening now. It’s also a relief,” she adds with a laugh, “not to have to spend the first 15 minutes of every meeting talking about the lack of content for women. Now it’s, ‘Yeah, got it.’ ” At the same time, she says, “a lot of us are having to step up into leadership positions that we didn’t know we were capable of. I definitely feel that in my life.” Putting more women on screen is a Hello Sunshine mandate. But surfacing the voices of real—and diverse—women is the company’s true mission. There are many female-focused production companies, and several successful digital brands that produce social content directed at women, but no entity has yet tried to do what Witherspoon is attempting: to build a premium independent film and TV studio within a direct-to-consumer, female-led brand that operates on multiple platforms. “Fortunately,” Witherspoon says, “I like proving people wrong.” Hello Sunshine is Witherspoon’s third production company. At 25, she had an office and five employees to develop movies for Universal Studios. She called it Type A Films. “I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “In four years I produced one film, Penelope, with Christina Ricci. It was beautiful, and I loved it, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t ready to tell stories—because I didn’t know what stories I wanted to tell.” 
 
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 As she aged, substantial roles became harder to come by. “It was getting laughable how bad the parts were, particularly for women over 35,” says Witherspoon. “And that, of course, is when you become really interesting as a woman.” Suddenly, there were stories she wanted to tell. Witherspoon thought about partnering again with a studio to develop films. Her husband, Jim Toth, dissuaded her. Toth is a motion picture talent agent at Creative Artists Agency, and it was apparent to him that his wife was good at reading the zeitgeist and spotting promising authors. Toth told her, “‘Babe, do it yourself,'” Witherspoon recalls. “‘You read more books than anyone I know. You know what works as well as anyone.'” She also wanted to “further the evolution of women’s roles,” she says, and they both knew that partnering with a studio would mean satisfying a corporate mandate. “I’d be making products they like,” she says. Witherspoon joined forces in 2012 with another producer, Bruna Papandrea. They created a company called Pacific Standard, which went on to adapt two of that year’s hottest book properties, Crown Publishing Group’s Gone Girl and Alfred A. Knopf’s Wild (Strayed had personally sent an advance copy directly to Witherspoon in November 2011). Around the time that they were developing Big Little Lies, in 2014, Witherspoon began noting changes in consumer behavior. “Women weren’t going to movies,” she says. “They were streaming shows. They were on Instagram and Facebook. Digital was winning. The only way was to go where women are, instead of expecting them to come to us in theaters.” The digital imperative was underscored by her three children—Ava, 18, and Deacon, 14 (with first husband, actor Ryan Phillippe), and 5-year-old Tennessee (with Toth, whom she married in March 2011). For them, YouTube and streaming had replaced watching network TV and going to the movies. Rather than moaning like so many in the industry about the tyranny of tiny screens, Witherspoon became excited by the creative potential of digital platforms and the relationships forged on social media. She joined Instagram in 2013 and started to build an audience (12.8 million followers to date). Draper James—which now has four brick-and-mortar stores—allowed her to become involved with consumers in a more intimate way. “I’d never had that before. I was always behind a screen. And I’m an extrovert,” adds Witherspoon, who remains creative director and the face of the retail company. Witherspoon’s second-ever Instagram post, in May 2013, was about J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel The Engagements (“I love this book! Has anyone else read?”). It got a big-enough reaction that other book recommendations followed. News she posted about Pacific Standard’s coming adaptations of Gone Girl and Wild gave both novels sales bumps. According to Amazon Books, Gone Girl sales tripled following the release of the first movie trailer, then doubled during the opening weekend. Witherspoon learned that she could personally build audiences for movies long before they were released. At the same time, she was also loving the conversations she was having with other women about literature. After starting an informal Instagram-led book club in 2015, Witherspoon grew even more interested in digital community 
 
 building. Papandrea preferred to stick with film and TV. The pair decided to dissolve Pacific Standard (though they continue to partner on Big Little Lies; season 2 is due in 2019), and Witherspoon began to think about who might help her build a consumer-facing brand. 
 
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 If Witherspoon is the soul of Hello Sunshine, then CEO Sarah Harden, a fast-talking Australian, is the heart of the place, pumping life into the operation daily. I meet her in the company’s second office, in Beverly Hills, where the film and TV brainstorming happens. Harden and Witherspoon met through Peter Chernin, who was head of 20th Century Fox when the studio produced 2005’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, for which Witherspoon won a Best Actress Oscar. When Chernin left the company, Witherspoon followed his career. “He is very smart,” she says, “and a good prognosticator.” Chernin had gone on to found his own media company, the Chernin Group, and launch (with AT&T) a subsidiary called Otter Media, dedicated to acquiring and building media brands for niche audiences. One of them, Crunchyroll, is now the largest global distributor of anime. The executive overseeing Otter’s acquisitions was Harden, who watched digital media studio Rooster Teeth turn itself into an online mecca for gamers. “Sixty thousand people go to [the Rooster Teeth] convention in Austin every summer,” Harden says. “I said, ‘We’ve got to find a female equivalent.’ ” She spent four years looking at existing female-driven brands. Most “were beauty- and fashion-focused, publishing-focused. They weren’t video storytelling at their core. And video is expensive,” she adds. “It takes incisive understanding to build full-scale, profitable businesses around that, and it requires creating a brand people love.” Witherspoon first brought her idea for Hello Sunshine to Chernin in the summer of 2016. One of her criteria: “I needed to have a woman run the company,” she says. Chernin introduced her to Harden, and by November, Otter Media was Hello Sunshine’s only external seed investor (for an amount in the “single-digit millions,” says Harden), joining Witherspoon, Toth, and investor Seth Rodsky, who was Witherspoon’s partner in founding Draper James. The investment “had nothing to do with Reese being a movie star,” says Chernin. “She’s a great entrepreneur because of her willpower. And she had a remarkably clear idea of what she wanted to build.” He also saw a potentially lucrative white space for an underserved audience. Unlike the millennial- and coastal-focused brands that dominate the digital landscape, Witherspoon is targeting literate women across America, spanning a strikingly wide age range of 20 to 60. Hello Sunshine now has 19 employees, with 20 more likely to join by year’s end—a workforce that, yes, includes men. It’s important, Witherspoon says, that men “feel they have an opportunity to create a new reality for the world too.” Underlying everything, says Harden, is books. Witherspoon’s book club picks—and, yes, she chooses each one (helpfully, she reads fast)—were an easy way to establish the company’s tone. One of Harden’s first moves after taking the helm of the company last June was to turn each selection into a monthly event, supported by video interviews with authors (usually conducted by Witherspoon), social posts on, say, a book’s inspiration, and giveaways—all in the service of community building. Maintaining levity is important, says Harden: “You can go to earnest places very quickly, and Reese will say, ‘This is not funny! Nothing about this is funny!’ ” 
 
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 Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine, which counts upwards of 460,000 followers on Instagram, hasn’t reached Oprah book club heights (more than a million followers), but Hello Sunshine is already considered by the publishing industry to be a powerful marketing force. Two of her selections have been HarperCollins titles: Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network and Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows. “With both novels, we saw significant upticks, not just in sales but in distribution,” says Jennifer Hart, a marketing executive at the publishing company, who is particularly optimistic about a recently launched Hello Sunshine newsletter. Witherspoon is world-famous, deep-pocketed, and married to a top agent at a leading Hollywood agency (where she is also a client). It’s tempting for people to attribute her success as a producer to her undeniable advantage. But Witherspoon’s pipeline to the book world is authentic and robust. Since posting her first book recommendation five years ago, she has relied on her taste and instinct to predict, again and again, which titles will resonate with her audience, and that has encouraged the book world to court her attention. The Alice Network became a New York Times bestseller six months after Witherspoon selected it for her book club. HarperCollins even timed the release of last March’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows—”which wasn’t on anyone’s radar as a big book,” says Hart—to coincide with the Hello Sunshine pick. “I don’t think there’s anyone out there who is as much of an advocate for female authors, and for pushing out new, diverse voices,” says Hart. Little Fires Everywhere was months from publication when Witherspoon first read it, and she chose it for her book club last September, before it became a monster best seller. Like Big Little Lies, the novel is rich with conversation starters—in this case, adoption, parenting, race, and class. Witherspoon had been looking for a series to coproduce with Kerry Washington, and the minute she finished Little Fires, she emailed the actress. “The message was, ‘I’ve found our project!’ ” says Washington, who was shooting Scandal at the time. “I finished it in 72 hours. I literally locked myself in a bathroom.” Hulu won the bidding war and is developing the series. @reesewitherspoon and @kerrywashington are on ???????????? with some MAJOR news. ???? our Stories or tap the link in bio to see what they’ve been up to! #LittleFiresEverywhere @pronounced_ing A post shared by Hello Sunshine (@hellosunshine) on Mar 2, 2018 at 10:11am PST Hello Sunshine’s newest venture is a multiyear partnership with Audible, the world’s largest producer of audiobooks, which will allow anyone to access the audio versions of Witherspoon’s monthly book club picks. Don Katz, the founder of the company, now owned by Amazon, had lunch with Witherspoon in May 2017 (they were both speaking at the Milken Conference) and “one thing led to another,” he says. A separate but related deal, Audible Originals x Hello Sunshine, will enable Witherspoon’s company to commission new audio-first or audio-exclusive works from authors, playwrights, and TV writers. “Reese is focused on talent—actors and writers—who [are] underemployed for various reasons,” says Katz, “and she’s aware of an audience that is similarly underserved. All of those people come with her.” Chernin says that Hello Sunshine’s biggest challenge now is growing its daily engagement, and Harden and Witherspoon know that one key to this will be maintaining Hello Sunshine’s positive, pro-women voice. Witherspoon has been remarkably savvy in the way she communicates with her audience. But as Lena Dunham, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tony Robbins might attest, too much honesty can be perilous when you are running a personal brand. A single tone-deaf comment, awkwardly phrased joke, or attempt at “making a little trouble” as Nora Ephron suggests, could derail your entire business. But Witherspoon’s wit and straightforwardness are what her fans love about her. If she plays it too safe, she risks losing them, too. 
 
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 Witherspoon needs to walk off a sciatica flare-up, a recent development, so we stroll from the Santa Monica office to a nearby grocery and café. Witherspoon, who grew up in Nashville, talks about having two doctors as parents—her father is a retired otolaryngologist and her mother has a PhD in pediatric nursing. “My dad, every day he read medical journals and historical novels. If you didn’t have something interesting to say at the dinner table, it was because you weren’t doing any research or you weren’t a curious person,” she says. “He’s not a people person,” she adds. “I get that from my mom.” Asked about her career role models, she thinks for a few moments. “Goldie Hawn,” she says finally. “When she saw studios weren’t making parts for her, she knew her audience and would create a film based on what she knew they wanted to see—Private Benjamin, or Wildcats. Also Dolly Parton, who told me she did her best work partnering with women.” The old trope of the competitive female coworker, will, in Witherspoon’s opinion, disappear as jobs for them increase. “There’s real power in partnership, and I don’t think we have the ego thing as much.” HBO’s chairman and CEO, Richard Plepler, says that when Witherspoon learned that Nicole Kidman was also interested in optioning Big Little Lies, Witherspoon and Papandrea got in touch with Kidman and suggested that they join forces. “I love that about Reese,” says Plepler. “There’s room for everyone at the table.” For Witherspoon, partnering with Kidman has proved to be what she calls a “one plus one equals five” strategy: “People see the show’s success, that it makes a lot of money for the company, and that will create another show like that.” It’s playing out faster than she could have imagined. Casey Bloys, HBO’s president of programming, admitted in April that the network’s recent equal-pay push (e.g., Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood will earn as much as her male costars starting with season 3) was a “direct result” of the Time’s Up movement and encouragement he received from Witherspoon. Witherspoon and Kidman, meanwhile, will each take more than $500,000 per episode for season 2 of Big Little Lies. While crunching on avocado oil potato chips at the café, Witherspoon tells me about an exercise she does with her family, on the rare occasions when they watch TV together. A commercial will come on—such as a recent Adidas ad featuring athletes, models, and DJs sitting around a table, talking about what’s cool—and when it’s over, she’ll press pause and ask, “What did you see?” In this instance, “they said they saw a mix of people who were interesting and creative. And I said, ‘You know what I see? Three women and 13 men at the table. That’s what I see.’ ” Invariably, during these exercises, her family will ask her to roll the commercial back to check her math, and she’s usually pretty close. “Now my husband sees it all the time,” she says. “You just have to ask yourself, What am I not seeing?” 
 
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 One of the projects in development at Hello Sunshine is a film version of Karin Tanabe’s The Gilded Years, which will be released by TriStar/Sony Pictures next year. The 2016 novel reimagines the true story of the first black graduate of Vassar, in 1897, who was light-skinned enough to pass for white. Witherspoon fast-tracked a bidding war by preemptively casting the immensely popular former Disney star and pop singer Zendaya, who will also coproduce. For the adaptation, called A White Lie, she hired veteran TV screenwriter and producer Monica Beletsky (Fargo, Parenthood) because Beletsky had an idea for how to turn the period piece—always a hard sell with studios and audiences—into a thriller. Beletsky says she’s never before experienced the level of support she received from Hello Sunshine. “It can’t be overstated how rare it is to find producers who so quickly take a risk on an original idea, who are able to see the same film in their head that I see in mine,” she says. In her experience, producers don’t prep much before pitching movies to studios—”maybe a phone call the day before,” she says. But prior to her first meeting with potential buyers for A White Lie, Hello Sunshine had her workshop the pitch in front of different groups of employees. “I kid them that I felt like I’d been trained for the movie-storytelling Olympics.” The pitches are multimedia productions: Beletsky described her script in front of images from the period; as she talked about a scene, the real places would appear behind her. She’s half black and half Jewish, so she spent some time talking about identity; Zendaya spoke of “colorism” and how she connected to the material. At the end of one meeting, a potential buyer said, “Well, the good news is that we’re living in a world where people are more open-minded,” recalls Lauren Neustadter, Hello Sunshine’s head of TV and film development. Witherspoon was dismayed by the comment, Neustadter says, and on the way back to the office Witherspoon asked her assistant to find current photos of the boards of various big corporations, as well as members of Congress. They offered a stark finale to the team’s second pitch meeting, one that emphasized how little has actually changed—the very reason the film needs to be made. “Reese got very emotional,” remembers Neustadter, “and she said to the room, ‘We wish that we lived in a world where that was different.’ ” She was essentially asking studio execs what she asks of her family: What are you not seeing? It’s a question she hopes every Hello Sunshine project will answer. Reese Witherspoon is No. 11 on the 2018 Most Creative People in Business list. Check out all 100 people here. 
 
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 Related video: Reese Witherspoon on her mentor, Oprah
– Reese Witherspoon never regrets becoming an actress, but she does miss one thing: her privacy. "I parted with my privacy a long time ago," she tells Vogue in a new profile. "We went different ways. And sometimes I mourn it. Sometimes I will sit in the car and cry. Because I can’t get out." More from the interview, given a few months before Witherspoon's March 26 wedding: On the increased amount of attention she's been getting from the paparazzi: "It usually heats up during, like, pregnancies or babies or marriage. It’s the drama of real life. ... Readers want to know!" One good thing about all the attention: "I get hugged a lot. Which is fun." On her then-fiance, CAA agent Jim Toth: "He’s wonderful. He’s just a really great guy ... I just feel really lucky to be with someone who cares so much and is so kind and loving. You know? It’s a really nice thing to finally have that." On her current emotional state: "Even though I am nervous and excited and all those things people feel when they are about to get married, I think I am mostly very calm right now. Usually, I’m a little bit of a squirrel. I have a squirrelly energy." On turning 35: "I’ve had some really kind of sad moments lately. You don’t go backward! And I think 35 for a woman is a big thing. ... You can’t pretend you are an ingenue. You can’t pretend you are wide-eyed and innocent. It’s on your face! It’s in your body. It’s in your voice." Click for the full piece, or check out a picture from Reese's wedding or gossip about her honeymoon.