Reese Witherspoon Admitted Why Her Hollywood Success Was a Financial Illusion After 3 Major Hits
Reese Witherspoon is a bona fide Hollywood movie star: an A-list Oscar winner with all the trappings of a rich celebrity. Still, she’s admitting that her financial success was an illusion up until a few short years ago — her Hello Sunshine production company couldn’t afford its four employees.
The now-48-year-old actress revealed at the Shine Away conference on Saturday, Oct. 5, via The Hollywood Reporter, that she started the company without a business plan. “When I was 34 I had enough foundation under myself, inside our business; I also had enough money to help start funding, and I was like, I’m not going to take money from people who don’t want the change that I want to see,” she explained. Witherspoon sweated about the finances, though, because it was a huge investment in herself and those working for her to develop more female-centric stories.
WILD, Reese Witherspoon, 2014./ph: Anne Marie Fox/TM and Copyright ©Fox Searchlight. All rights reserved.
“It was scary because I didn’t know if I was going to get my money back,” she added. “Every day I woke up thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m not gonna get my money back.’ But I would rather bet on myself and lose that money trying hard. I woke up every single day and I was like, ‘I am my own lottery ticket.’” By the time she reached the top of Hollywood with eight Emmy wins for Big Little Lies, and the success of Gone Girl and Wild, she was still struggling financially.
“I had a moment right after Big Little Lies — I had self-funded my first company and I thought, OK well, Big Little Lies won all these Emmys, and Wild and Gone Girl got all these Oscar nominations, and we made $600 million at the box office,” Witherspoon recalled. “I had four employees, and I couldn’t keep the lights on,” Witherspoon recalled. “I remember the accountant calling me, going, ‘You didn’t make enough money producing those three things to keep four employees.’” She had to bring on a CEO in 2017 with corporate experience to give her company a real structure and get her back on track.
That move paid off handsomely in 2021 when she sold off Hello Sunshine to the Wall Street investment firm, Blackstone Group, for a reported $900 million, per The New York Times. Witherspoon had an idea, and she knew how to execute the creative aspect of her endeavor, but she needed real guidance on developing an infrastructure that would make Hello Sunshine a real Hollywood player.
Before you go, click here to see all the best picks from Reese Witherspoon’s book club.
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