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Reese Witherspoon And Nicole Kidman Collaborate On Changing Hollywood

By Nicole Boyer
Published on: 17:17 PST, Jan 14, 2017

Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman are getting ready to be featured in an upcoming HBO limited series Big Little Lies. They believe the show is one small step toward huge changes in Hollywood. These two Academy Award-winning actresses are co-executive producers for this show, which raises issues of women supporting each other. Both actresses feel an extreme importance of this project.

“I’m passionate [about producing] because things have to change. We have to start seeing women as they really are on film.”

Reese Witherspoon believes that women are being underestimated on the screen by only playing wives and girlfriends. Proving her point, there is a research project conducted by USC Annenberg’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative showing that women played less than a third of the speaking roles in the top films from 2007-2014.

Witherspoon joked about being the only women on the set.

“They call it the Smurfette syndrome,” she said, “Who gave birth to all these Smurfs?” However, during the filming of the upcoming limited series, she didn’t have to worry about being the sole woman on the set, as she was surrounded by many talented women, such as her co-stars, including Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, and Zoe Kravitz.

The limited series Big Little Lies is based on Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel of the same name, told from the perspective of three mothers: Jane (Woodley), a newcomer to Monterrey who moved there to have a better life for her son, Madeline (Witherspoon), part-time worker and full-time mom who becomes friends with Jane on the first day of school, and Celeste (Kidman), a devoted mother (with a secret personal life) and long-time friend of Madeline. The comedy is splashed with a bit of mystery and murder, letting the characters unite in order to achieve a common goal.

The Oscar-winning actresses decided to devote their time and get invested into this story because of the great opportunity to put a lot of diverse women on the screen.

“I think what was great about reading the novel for the first time is that I saw myself in different stages of motherhood all through my life,” Witherspoon said. “I was a mom at 22, I was a mom at 40… I’ve been divorced, I’ve been re-married.

“They showed every spectrum and color of a woman’s life. I thought it was incredible to have so many parts for women in one piece of material,” she continued, as Variety reports.

Reese Witherspoon believes that the time has come for people to see real women on film, as they are in real life, with real experiences, and real characters. Nicole Kidman also said that she deeply related to the book and especially to the female characters and their life story. She also underlined the uniqueness of the screenplay, as it featured five different and deep roles for women, which is extremely rare for Hollywood.

Reese Witherspoon has been an active philanthropist for a while, as well as boosting her career as a producer. Recently, she got involved with more than five different projects, including Gone Girl and Wild.

Both ladies hope and believe that this on-screen story, and their experience, will reach the ears of those who own high-powered offices in Hollywood, underlying the importance of deeper and more complicated roles created for women.

Big Little Lies premieres February 19 on HBO.

[Featured Image by Richard Shotwell/AP Images]

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