While she’s “not traumatized” by the experience, the actress said, “It made me understand where my place was in the pecking order of filmmaking”
Reese Witherspoon is reflecting on how the sex scene in Fear made her uncomfortable.
The 1996 psychological thriller, directed by James Foley (Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed), was one of the actress’s first films. In it, she starred as a high-schooler who gets swept up in a volatile romance with a manipulative, dangerous man (played by Mark Wahlberg).
In a new cover interview with Harper’s BAZAAR for the magazine’s August 2023 Performance Issue, Witherspoon, now 47, recalled that she “didn’t have control” over the scene in question, where her teenage character Nicole experiences an orgasm while riding a roller coaster, at the hand of Wahlberg’s character, David.
“It wasn’t explicit in the script that that’s what was going to happen, so that was something that I think the director thought of on his own and then asked me on set if I would do it, and I said no,” Witherspoon explained.
And while the outlet noted that Witherspoon requested a stunt double for the shots taken below the waist, “It wasn’t a particularly great experience,” the Oscar winner added.
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Though the experience wasn’t a positive one for Witherspoon, she insisted to Harper’s BAZAAR that she’s “certainly not traumatized or anything by it.”
“But it was formative,” she said. “It made me understand where my place was in the pecking order of filmmaking.”
For Witherspoon, “It’s another one of those stories that made me want to be an agent for change and someone who maybe can be in a better leadership position to tell stories from a female perspective instead of from the male gaze,” she said.
During her speech at the Elle Women in Hollywood event in October 2017, Witherspoon spoke out about sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, recalling an incident she said occurred when she was 16.
“I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly and I find it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings that I’ve been having about anxiety, honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier,” she said during the event, held in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
The Wild star went on to say she feels “true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.”
“And I wish that I could tell you that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn’t,” Witherspoon said. “I’ve had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault and I don’t speak about them very often.”
“But after hearing all the stories these past few days and hearing these brave women speak up tonight about things that we’re kind of told to sweep under the rug and not to talk about, it’s made me want to speak up and speak up loudly because I actually felt less alone this week than I have ever felt in my entire career,” she added.