"I had to be an anthropologist," the actress explains.
For her first film since Legally Blonde sent her Hollywood stock soaring, Witherspoon didn’t need to do any such homework. The film is a romantic comedy entitled Sweet Home Alabama in which she is cast as Melanie Carmichael, a sophisticated and successful New York fashion designer. After a whirlwind romance, Melanie becomes engaged to the Big Apple’s most eligible bachelor (played by Patrick Dempsey), obliging her to sneak back to Alabama to confront her less glamorous past and the husband (John Lucas) she married in high school who now refuses to give her a divorce.
Though she has no hidden romantic entanglements in her own past, she married fellow actor Ryan Phillippe in 1999 and the couple has a two-year-old daughter, Ava. Witherspoon knows the South. She grew up in Nashville, the home of country music, and half jokingly says the initial appeal of Sweet Home Alabama was simply a chance to get back in touch with her Southern roots. Sweet Home Alabama was, incidentally, also the first film to shoot in New York after the tragedy of last September, an experience Reese recalls as incredibly emotional.
"I haven’t really made a film in the South before," says Witherspoon, who’s surprisingly petite and as pretty as expected, and who’s sipping tea and honey on a short break between filming the movie’s final scenes on location in Atlanta. In the background, a crew member is putting some finishing touches to a trailer home where Reese as Melanie is about to visit her blue-collar parents (played by Mary Kay Place and Fred Ward). An electric bug zapper hangs on the porch along with a ceramic squirrel and macramé plant holders.
"There’s so much local color here," says Witherspoon, who is dressed in a black sweater, gray skirt and knee high black boots. "There’s so much great architecture and so much history, and people are such characters. There’s a certain attitude too, a certain view of the world, which is quite distinct, and I can see it come through with the local actors who are working on the film."
"The other thing about the script was that I really felt very close to this character I play, " adds Witherspoon. "With this character, Melanie, she talks in my voice, she carries herself the way I carry myself. It’s like I’m putting myself out there and saying, ‘Okay, do you like who I am?’ I mean, Melanie starts out a Southern girl and escapes to New York and builds this life for herself as a fashion designer. I could really completely relate to the fact that here’s this woman who has gone to a different city and involved herself in an industry where she has had to adopt a certain persona in order to get ahead. And I think the film ultimately asks those age-old questions, Can you ever really go home again? Are you still essentially the same person whatever your experiences? Does success change you for good?"
And the answer to the question? Sweet Home Alabama being a romantic comedy, we can probably fairly assume the fictional Melanie’s heart is ultimately discovered to be in the right place; but what about Melanie’s alter ego? Has success changed Reese Witherspoon? Can she go home again?
"Well, yes, I do go home quite a bit," Reese laughs, "but I think I’ve become a much more urban person than I ever expected to be. I like big cities. And sometimes I come home and it’s like being on another planet. But I think I still have my feet on the ground.
"Being a mother is part of that. You know, you can’t feel too special when you’ve got spit-up running down your shirt. It’s hard to get on your high horse when you’re cleaning dirty diapers all day.
"And I still have the same friends from high school and they don’t think of me as famous at all," Reese adds, "so that’s a reality check. I took one of them to go see a concert a few weeks ago and we had the chance to go backstage to meet the performer. And she goes, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m so excited, I’ve never met anybody famous before.’ One of my other friends said, ‘What about Reese?’ Apparently I didn’t count."
As a teenager, Reese Witherspoon had planned on following in her parents’ footsteps and studying medicine–her father is a surgeon and her mother a pediatric nurse. Yet a chance audition to be an extra in a film called Man In The Mood led to a leading role in the film, successive film offers and a gradually burgeoning career. Reese did eventually enroll at Stanford University to study medicine but dropped out when the director Robert Benton offered her a role in the 1998 thriller Twilight alongside Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman.
"My parents still think I might go back to medicine," the actress says, but, had there been any doubt, the success of Legally Blonde confirms that Reese will be kept busy by Hollywood for a while to come. Reese’s previous performances–as the grimly determined Tracey Flick in Election and opposite future husband Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions–had clearly made her a name to watch. But it was the success of Legally Blonde that made her a truly bankable star and the offers have been coming thick and fast ever since.
As far as my personal life goes," Reese adds, "everything carries on the same way. I still go home at night, cook dinner for my family, sit around, watch movies. Ryan and I maintain a real sense of normalcy. We’re kind of regular people with regular friends. We just happen to have a job that garners a lot of attention."
Even the increased profile that has come with Legally Blonde’s worldwide success isn’t about to change that, Reese insists, nor is she about to give up being a hands-on mom to daughter Ava.
"Ryan and I try not to work at the same time, but it’s a challenge," she explains. "It’s a lot of scheduling, especially since she’s not in school yet. But it’s also a nice sort of escape for me. I mean, I love this job and I have an incredible drive and an intense work ethic. I would say I’m probably a workaholic. But at the end of the day, it’s still just my job. I love being a mom and being a wife and having great friends."
For all that, Reese still plans to have a long career and for that she has her role models already picked out: Frances McDormand, Holly Hunter and Susan Sarandon. "I think it’s important that you show people you can do character work," she says. "I look at those women and they manage to sustain wonderful careers, and it hasn’t always been about them being this year’s sex symbol. They’re very attractive women of course, but with them it’s about doing really good work."