Her production company is called Type A, a moniker her latest costar,
says fits her strong sense of self perfectly. And even when she appears
to be having a spontaneous moment, lamenting that her well-orchestrated
career built around an avoidance of bikinis has been breached by her
current role as a leotard-clad circus performer, it turns out the line
is a well-rehearsed quip that’s been repeated, practically on a loop,
to scores of media outlets.
Which makes it all the more confounding that the
35-year-old actress would subject herself to the unpredictable
behaviors of circus animals such as the nearly 9-ton elephant Tai and a
slew of trick horses when she shot the adaptation of the Depression-era
romance “Water for Elephants.”
“I have anxiety. I get nervous, and I shake,”
Witherspoon says. The night before shooting with the elephant, “I
didn’t sleep, and I literally shook and shook and shook,” she says,
feigning relaxation in a hotel room chair, still perfectly coiffed in a
gray dress and 3-inch heels after a long day of enchanting the
international press corps. “But the performances with the elephant were
really magical for me. Against my better instincts I decided to ride
the elephant with no harness, with no safety equipment. It was pretty
great.”
Could it be that Witherspoon is finally loosening
up? The native Southerner seems to be doing a lot of leaping without a
protective net lately. After ending her eight-year marriage to actor
just a week before embarking on a publicity tour for “Elephants,” which
opens Friday.
She’s moved easily between big studio projects and
smaller films throughout her career, but “Water for Elephants” is
something of a hybrid. It’s a roughly
drama — a genre that’s had a hard time making it at the box office in
recent years — but it’s based on a bestselling novel by
Though its Easter weekend release date hasn’t traditionally been strong for such films,
head of distribution, said the spring date was simply intended to fill
a void in the marketplace, noting there has been little in theaters for
women since Christmas. “The timing seemed perfect, and the picture was
ready,” Snyder said.
Witherspoon, whose successful “Legally Blonde” movies in the early 2000s led to her earning up to
a film so eagerly anticipated it made it onto many Oscar watchers’
lists before it had even screened. But it wound up as both a critical
and box-office failure.
“It’s a disappointment that audiences didn’t go to
the movie and didn’t love it,” the actress said. “It’s such an
investment of your time and your energy. You stand by the work and you
can’t say you didn’t try. And if
up today and said, ‘I want to write a movie for you,’ of course I would
do it. You can’t dwell on the disappointments. You have to keep moving
and making interesting choices.”
Working with unpredictable animals would certainly
seem to qualify. Her commitment to the demands of “Elephants” surprised
even her director,
“A lot of people talk about training and practicing
and what that really means is not very much. I was impressed by her
physicality, training with the animals, getting good and conquering it
when it feels scary,” Lawrence says. “She also got really into the body
language. Costume designer
a bunch of movies from the ’30s and she really studied these women and
how they moved and spoke and held their bodies. She changed a lot about
herself physically for this.”
It was the emotion of the character, though, that
Witherspoon connected to when choosing to play Marlena, the luminescent
animal rider. Though Witherspoon was not interested in speaking about
her recent nuptials, she readily acknowledges that the roles she
chooses subconsciously mirror some of her own life experiences. So it’s
easy to see the appeal of the “Water for Elephants” story line of
finding new love.
In the film, Marlena is trapped in an abusive marriage with the volatile ringmaster August (
“She’s got her life wound so tightly and controlled
down to every detail,” Witherspoon says of Marlena, but you get the
sense she’s really speaking autobiographically. “You know whenever you
feel terribly out of control, you try to control everything and keep it
very small. Then in comes this Jacob character: idealistic, young and
hopeful. … For me, this movie is about optimism, that second chances
are possible. And to be fearless in your decision-making.”
Witherspoon’s bravery also manifested as strength through the dusty and often dangerous shoot in the
last summer. Pattinson recalls filming a key scene between the two of
them and a sick horse, one in which Witherspoon is comforting the
massive animal, while delivering her lines through her tears of
sadness. “I literally saw the horse put his entire weight on her thigh
and she didn’t say anything to anybody and we continued,” says
Pattinson. “At the end of it, I had to come up to her and say, ‘That
must have hurt. You can’t tell me it didn’t.’ And she said, ‘Yes, I’m
going to go back to my trailer and cry now.’ But she held those tears
(of pain) for about 45 minutes.”
That tenacity has been beneficial to Witherspoon
throughout her acting life. She recognizes that her toughness has
helped her maintain a lengthy career in a fickle
“There are a lot of stumbling blocks as an actor,” she says. “There is
a lot of rejection and a lot of being told you’re not this or you’re
not that. Anyone who thinks that once you’ve become an established
actor you’re on easy street, that’s just not true.”
It’s hard to believe that the diminutive actress, who landed a lead actress Oscar in 2006 for her performance as
writer-director Brooks actually wrote “How Do You Know” specifically
for her. But she contends that the Oscar didn’t change her career
exponentially; rather, it broadened the possibilities. “I’m very lucky
that I’ve gotten to do a lot of comedies and a lot of dramas, but (the
Oscar) sort of legitimized my dramatic career. It made it easier for
people to see me in that context.”
Lawrence, who knew Witherspoon socially before he
cast her in “Elephants,” says his perceptions of the actress had
changed twice before meeting her. “I thought she was unbelievable in
‘Election,’ says the 40-year-old director referring to the
then-23-year-old’s role as the monster-clothed-in-schoolgirl-attire
“It was the first time I’d seen the perfect blend of humor and drama,
playing a character that was actually quite scary. The second time was
playing
Witherspoon, who has two children with Phillippe, a
10-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son, clearly wants to continue
down the path of dramas. When asked who else she’d like to work with,
the actress points to some of the great dramatic filmmakers of our
time:
In the meantime, she’ll toggle between dramas and comedies, with the action-comedy “This Means War,” opposite
“There are days when I wish it was a suit that I
could just zip off and put next to the door and just be vulnerable,”
she says of the fame and media scrutiny. “And then there are other days
when I get to travel the world and do incredible things. Those days are
reminders of why I do this.”
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(c) 2011, Los Angeles Times.
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