Reese Witherspoon: Didn't I Play Hillary Clinton Already?

June 6th, 2015 6:28 AM

At a Hollywood conference on women in film, actress and producer Reese Witherspoon was asked if she would ever consider playing Hilary Clinton and said, ““I’ve actually been asked to play Hillary Clinton a couple of times…But didn’t I play her already? When I did meet Hillary Clinton, she said, ‘Everybody talks to me about Tracy Flick in Election all the time.'”

Roger Ebert once said of the character, “She is always perfectly dressed and groomed, and is usually able to conceal her hot temper behind a facade of maddening cheerfulness. But she is ruthless.”  Flick and Clinton have been compared so much that in 2008 Slate created a “hilarious” mashup comparing the two.  

A Hollywood Reporter story on the conference noted Witherspoon and her producing partner, Bruna Papandrea started their company, Pacific Standard, to focus on creating interesting roles for women in film.  

“We share the goal of making movies solely with women at the center of the story…The films we make aren’t for women, they’re not chick flicks…” and cited Gone Girl, Wild and Hot Pursuit as examples.

She added, “Women make up 50 percent of the population, so we should make up 50 percent of the [roles and stories] in movies," she added. “It’s not a crazy thought, it’s just a representation of reality."

Witherspoon made the decision to produce movies three years ago when she began to notice “they were making less movies for women, and that meant less parts for women.”

In the beginning, it wasn’t easy for Pacific Standard. Papandrea said when they first went to studios with the manuscript for Gone Girl, “no one gave it a chance.”

“We sent the book to every studio, and nobody read it. And then it went to No. 1. And they all scrambled," said Witherspoon.

Hollywood should look up the definition of diversity before claiming they embrace it, then look up the definition of hypocrisy, which is something they clearly embrace.