Reese Witherspoon wants to leave Hollywood a better place for women than she found it. Through Pacific Standard, the production company she co-founded, and later a more expansive media operation named Hello Sunshine, Witherspoon has used her industry clout to take stories from book to screen. Raising the bar for both the quality and success of screen adaptations, she has produced projects that deepen the range of women’s narratives: In 2023 alone she put “Tiny Beautiful Things” on Hulu, Apple TV+ bought “The Last Thing He Told Me” and the megahit “Daisy Jones & the Six” streamed on Amazon.
Witherspoon, 48, starts with books she believes in. She’s known to approach authors personally to seek their blessing and obtain book rights. As Cheryl Strayed recalled, until Witherspoon and her team came around, no one was exactly clamoring to adapt “Wild,” her memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Hollywood’s chattering class gossiped about why Witherspoon — “America’s sweetheart,” as Strayed called her — would choose to play a “crazy woman who’d been living in a cave.” Witherspoon, who Strayed recalled just laughed off the whispers, was nominated for a 2015 Oscar for her portrayal of Strayed. And when Hello Sunshine picked up Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice columns to adapt into “Tiny Beautiful Things,” the doubters, if there were any left, had nothing to say.
Celeste Ng, whose novel “Little Fires Ev.
