Reese Witherspoon shares about projects selection: 'Not meant to do dark movies'

Reese Witherspoon and her Hello Sunshine media firm on Saturday organised an event Shine Away featured several chats with Witherspoon's A-list associates and friends.

Numerous celebrities spoke at the event including Jennifer Garner, Mindy Kaling, Tracee Ellis Ross, Allyson Felix, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin from The Home Edit, Eve Rodsky, Hannah Bronfman, Cheryl Strayed.

Witherspoon took the stage after Fortune Feimster performed a brief stand-up set to describe on how she selects her projects, stating that she had a revelation that, “I’m not meant to be doing dark, heavy, intense, horror, gore, darkness movies. People like to see me do light movies, and I was like, OK. It doesn’t put you in the cool kids club a lot but I don’t care, I don’t want to be in the cool kids club. I want to make optimistic stuff that makes girls excited to be women in this world, because it is a wonderful thing to be a woman in this world.”

Kaling teased that “B.J. Novak says it’s not a Mindy Kaling show unless there’s a man running shirtless in slow motion. And you know what, I’ve been so used to the male gaze my entire life that yes, I will look at a handsome torso. And I want to provide that for you.”

Witherspoon acknowledged that she had worked hard to strike a balance outside of work, saying, “I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled, like work has always been my bomb. And I started to realize that isn’t going to work for me; about a year ago I was like, ‘I was a robot and the robot broke.'”